From time to time a fleeting thought would run through my mind and I’d consider composing a blog bit about the years I spent working on the popular television show M*A*S*H.
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But then I’d think: Nahhhhh.
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However, just a few nights ago I received my second request for it.
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I had first mentioned the idea in a blog bit last August, and my blog buddyette Alliterative Allomorph (or “AlliAllo” for short) commented: “I'd LOVE to hear about the time you worked for MASH! Next blog project?”
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Then a few nights ago, my dearly beloved Brother Napoleon (or Nappy for short) and I started yakkin’ about the old days, and he suggested I write something for my blog about my years on M*A*S*H. He even went so far as to get his cell phone camera and took a few pictures of a picture of me in the book ‘The Last Days Of MASH’. Which was ironically funny since I’m usually buggin’ him to loan me his cell phone camera so I can take some pictures for my blogs, and he’s usually grumbling about having to transmit the photos that I take to our computer.
I thought: OK, that’s two requests, and one even came from grumpy Nappy. And if I was ever going to write a blog bit about M*A*S*H, I knew there was no time to waste.
So, by popular demand (uh… two readers: a friend and a Bro), here it is, M*A*S*H S*T*U*F*F*S, thrown together quickly because time is short.
Although I’ve always loved the theme instrumental for the TV show MASH (‘Suicide Is Painless’), finding it bittersweet and lovely (and probably my second favorite theme song after ‘WKRP In Cincinnati’), ironically, I was never a fan of MASH. And I’m still not. Despite the fact I’m still receiving occasional (small) residual checks for work I did on the show beginning in 1978. Oh, I’m every bit as anti-war as anyone who ever wrote or acted on MASH. Nevertheless, MASH was way too Leftist for my tastes!
THE LAST DAYS OF M*A*S*H
‘The Last Days Of MASH’ is a 1983 book by Alan and Arlene Alda, which chronicles the final days of shooting during the 11th and final season of MASH.
My name appears in it, and so does my image, in a couple of photographs taken on the MASH set.
Below is a photograph that appears in the book ‘The Last Days Of MASH’ which features much of the cast and crew of MASH from its last season.
I can still remember that photograph being taken. I and my coworkers were done with filming for the day but we were invited to stick around for the 11th Season MASH picture that would be taken after a couple of “pick-up shots” were completed.
Most of my friends elected to remain in their “fatigues” for the photo that would be taken in about 30 or so minutes. Me, I got to thinking: Well, if I change out of my fatigues now, and into my street clothes, I won’t have to go back to the Wardrobe Department after the picture is taken; I will be able to go directly home.
Years later, I regretted that I had not remained in my “costume”, which would have shown me to be a “G.I.” and part of the cast. But now, it actually makes it easier for me to point myself out to you. Here is the 11th Season photo:
SURPRISING S*T*U*F*F*S
A few years ago, something inspired me to do some Internet research, to find out how many seasons I’d worked on MASH. My perception was that I’d worked on it for the last two seasons. I was startled to discover that I had actually worked on the show during its final five seasons!
MASH ran for 11 seasons. I was almost dumbfounded when I realized that I had worked on it for only half-a-season shy of 50% of its lifetime!
A couple years back, Brother Nappy gave me a Barnes & Noble gift card for Christmas. I hadn’t seen most of the MASH episodes I’d worked on since their initial television showings (and some of them I’d NEVER seen, because I rarely watched MASH), and I knew that I was unlikely to spend my own hard-earned money on MASH DVDs. So, I decided to apply Nappy’s gift card toward some MASH DVD sets. And that got me started.
Watching those old seasons of MASH decades later, and finding myself in episode after episode was almost surreal. I was regularly doing ‘Background’ (or, ‘Extra’) work on MASH beginning with Season 7 which premiered on September 18, 1978. It took about a week to film a single MASH episode, and there were some weeks (episodes) I never worked on it at all. But overall, I would say that from Season 7 through its final Season 11, I may have averaged two days per week of work on MASH. In other words, I can spot myself in the vast majority of the episodes over its final 5 seasons.
THOUGHTS THEN AND NOW
At the time, I was daily involved in Background work in movies, television shows, and TV commercials – it was just the way I supported myself – and I was never one to be “star-struck”, so I didn’t particularly have much esteem for what I was doing. Honestly, it was just a job to me, and I always hoped for a short day of filming so I could get back to my “real life” – mostly partying with my friends, ‘The League Of Soul Crusaders’ at Bay Street.
20th Century Fox and MGM were “good” jobs because they were close to my house. Warner Brothers and Universal Studios were “bad” jobs because they required that I drive out to “The Valley”. A job at Paramount studios was “middle ground” – in grungy Hollywood
When I became a “regular” on MASH, it was a blessing because MASH was filmed on Stage 9 at 20th Century Fox.
That’s truly the way I thought about it back then. What the hell did I know? I was just a young man. My goal was to become the greatest actor since James Dean, and working on sets, getting pegged to act in a small but notable bit in a show, or picking up a couple lines of dialogue here and there was just my “day job”. It would be many years – long after I’d left “The Industry” - before I realized what a unique and special position I was in and how fortunate I was to be doing what I was doing.
SOME S*T*U*F*F*S I DON’T REMEMBER
In watching these DVDs decades later, I was rather shocked to find myself prominently visible in a number of episodes/scenes that I had no recollection of whatsover! Sure, I could recall the episodes where I had dialogue. But there were times when I felt like I was watching some OTHER performer, because I had no remembrance of being involved in the shooting of those scenes.
For example: In the 9th episode (‘Taking The Fifth’) of Season 9, the story revolves around an issue with the 4077th MASH unit receiving anesthetics that are not potent enough to keep the patients “under” while the surgeries are performed. In one scene, B.J. Hunnicutt makes a joke to a patient about to undergo surgery. Suddenly the patient begins fighting to get off Dr. Hunnicutt’s operating table and it takes several orderlies and nurses to restrain him.
As I was watching that scene, I began to think: That looks like me!
And sure enough, it was! Although I had no recollection of that scene, nor even of that episode, when I put the DVD player on ‘pause’ and then watched that scene frame-by-frame, I easily recognized the unusual birthmark I have on my left forearm, proving that I was “the fighting patient”. (Obviously, all of my fighting was “a lot of flailing about, signifying nuttin’”; had I really wanted to get off that operating table, those orderlies and nurses couldn’t have prevented me from it.)
Another one of the several scenes I’d not remembered being involved in is found in Episode 12 (‘Blood And Guts’) of Season 10. There’s a scene in the Officer’s Club, and in the background, I steal another person’s beer (bartender Roy Goldman pretends to be shocked that I would do that) and I act as if I’ve got a pretty good buzz on. It’s not likely that many viewers would pick up on that Background activity, but it tickled me to see, decades later, how I had invented interesting “business” while performing basic Background duty – none of which I had recalled.
Some of the S*T*U*F*F*S I really enjoyed discovering was the continuity errors that no viewer was likely to notice. There were many. For instance: In Episode 15 (‘Bottom’s Up’) of Season 9, I’m being operated on when Nurse Kellye – played by Kellye Nakahara – nearly gives me the wrong blood type. In the VERY NEXT SCENE, I am visible in the Mess Tent and booing Hawkeye Pierce. (Yeah, the patients recuperated QUICKLY at the 4077th).
[Incidentally: I spent a lot of “down-time” over the years talking with other cast members, including the very popular Kellye Nakahara (“Nurse Kellye”) who, as I recall, had a degree in English Literature. I remember one day in particular when she asked to see a poem I’d written – ‘The Mad Dog’ – and she was impressed by it, comparing me to Stephen King. She may have been B.S.-ing a bit with the Stephen King comparison, but I could tell she was genuinely impressed by the poem.]
I found several back-to-back scenes like that: In one scene I’m being operated on or I’m laid-up in Post-Op with my head all bandaged, and in the next scene, I’m walking through the MASH compound or I’m standing just outside Hawkeye’s and B.J.’s tent, “The Swamp”, and tossing a football back and forth with another G.I. Funny stuffs.
I watched the 2 1/2–hour final episode ‘Goodbye, Farewell, And Amen’ on DVD. I hadn’t seen it since it aired on TV. I thought it was overrated then, and I thought it was overrated upon my second viewing as well.
But as I was watching the scene where the Korean War is declared “over”, and saw all the people in the camp celebrating, I thought to myself: Gee, it would have been really cool to have been involved in THAT particular scene!
Wouldn’t that be neat to be able to say you were one of the celebrating soldiers when the war was finally declared finished on M*A*S*H?
And then, son-of-a-gun, I spotted myself in the scene! I had no recollection of it at all, and yet there I was in the very scene I had just been wishing I could have been included in!
M*A*S*H (The War Ends!)
[At the 15-second mark, at the very far right edge of the frame, you can see a guy in a funky brown robe walking along and then he looks back at the truck of Korean musicians as it goes down the road. That’s me. And at the 41-43 second point, you can see me again, jumping around like an idiot.]
SOME S*T*U*F*F*S I DO REMEMBER
Naturally, I recall all the episodes in which I had some dialogue to deliver or was involved in some piece of important business that was crucial to the scene.
The M*A*S*H page at Wikipedia includes a section that highlights 16 Unusual Episodes. I know that I played a part in at least two of them.
Probably the most significant of the two was an episode titled “Life Time” in Season 8. That is one episode that every major MASH fan always seems to remember. Wikipedia says this:
"LifeTime" (originally aired November 26, 1979), which takes place in real time as the surgeons perform an operation that must be completed within 20 minutes (a clock in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen counts down the time).
The basic plot is that one soldier named Sherwood has suffered such a massive head wound that he is sure to die and there is nothing the surgeons at the 4077th can do to save him. At the same time, another badly injured soldier needs an aorta graft within a certain number of minutes if he is to survive and/or not lose the use of his legs. So the doctors are hoping Sherwood will die in time to take a piece of his aorta and transplant it into the second soldier.
Meanwhile, Sherwood’s best buddy, Roberts – played by actor Kevin Brophy – is angry that no one is attempting to save the life of his friend. What really made the episode so memorable to so many MASH fans is that a small clock in the corner of the screen kept track of the minutes in "real time", showing how much time was left to save the second soldier.
Would Sherwood die in time? Well, I was Sherwood, and sure I would! Being a good boy who cares about the welfare of others, of course I died in time! I was supposed to be in a coma the entire episode, essentially brain-dead (a victim of typecasting!) due to the head wound. So I never said anything, I just did a little gasping and heavy breathing before croaking.
I recall that between shots, Kevin Brophy struck up a conversation with me and began asking a number of personal questions. At one point I laughed and said, “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to get to know me on a personal level so you can make the scenes more meaningful for you.” (I had spent a lot of money and time in professional acting classes and workshops over the years, so I was aware of all the tricks, including that one.)
Kevin admitted that I had discerned his motivation for all the discussion and the questions. I didn’t blame him at all - it’s the exact same thing I would have been doing had I been in his shoes; that’s just the sign of a person who has really studied, understands, and respects their craft.
Another one that made Wikipedia’s ‘Unusual Episodes’ list was . . .
"Follies of the Living—Concerns of the Dead" (originally aired January 4, 1982 ), in which a dead soldier's ghost (Kario Salem) wanders around the compound, and only a feverish Klinger is able to see him or speak with him.
In that episode I provided a couple lines of voice-over dialogue. While the dead soldier is wandering around, he hears disembodied voices discussing things that seem important to the living but are of less concern to the dead. I remember recording my lines one day just before we broke for lunch. And I’m the bloke you hear (but don’t see) saying: “I just don’t love her anymore. It’s all over between us.”
I can find myself in most of the MASH episodes of the final 5 seasons, maybe in a driver’s education class, drinking beer at Rosie’s or in the Officer’s Club, playing in a floating craps game, etc. I remember some of those scenes being filmed, but most of them I do not.
Episode 3 of Season 7 is called ‘Lil’, in which ...“Colonel Potter meets a female soldier of the same age and interests as himself, named Lil. The others in the camp think that he might be cheating on Mildred, even though his friendship with Lil is completely platonic.”
There’s a scene in that episode when Potter gives Lil a tour of the Post-Op facility. At one point she looks down at a young wounded soldier asleep on a cot and she says something like: Look at that boy. He should be on a playground, not on a battlefield.
Then it cuts to a big close-up of my sweet and innocent face – me bandaged and asleep on the cot, looking like a wounded young angel.
What’s fairly funny is that at the time I was living something of a double-life. To the people on the MASH set I was that respectful, reserved, even shy, nice young man. Away from the set, and with my Bay Street “League” buddies, I was one of them: a rather wild, kinda funny, intense, semi-tough semi-hood, half outta control, "half-drunk half the time and all drunk the rest", stayin’ out until all hours of the wee bit o’ the mornin’, bar-hoppin' and just raisin’ hell:
There’s a better than even chance that when that footage of my sweet and innocent face was filmed for the ‘Lil’ episode, I was hungover and just dreamin’ about getting home to a lotta hair of the dog that bit me.
Below is a short clip I found at YouTube. It shows me in the Officer’s Club watching a woman play piano. That’s me in the background, just on the other side of the pianist, standing next to (Perry) the Black soldier. I’ve got a drink in my hands at first, and then I set my drink down and continue to watch with my hands in the pockets of my army pants:
M*A*S*H season 10 episode 1 - Piano Solo
MY FAVORITE M*A*S*H S*T*A*R*S
The two actors I spent the most time speaking with and got to like best were, first, Gary Burghoff who played Radar O’Reilly, and then later - after Burghoff left the show - David Ogden Stiers who played Charles Winchester.
I got to know Gary Burghoff as a result of my drawing and his love of art. I would often spend all that “waiting time” between shot set-ups drawing pictures in my sketch books. One day early on during my first season working on MASH we were shooting exteriors at the Malibu Gary
[For sketch book drawings see “No Drugs Except For Pink Floyd” and “No Drugs Except For Pink Floyd – Part 2”.]
Gary was intrigued by what he saw and we wound up in a long and rather deep conversation. Somehow we got onto the topic of spirituality; I probably recommended to him the Richard Bach book ‘ILLUSIONS: The Adventures Of A Reluctant Messiah’, and he suggested I read ‘NOTES TO MYSELF’ by Hugh Prather. I jotted it down on the back cover of a sketch book (getting both the title and the name of the author wrong, although I did later get the book and read it).
At that time, Gary paid me what to this day is the most memorable compliment I’ve ever received. He said: “I think you’re a creative genius”.
And putting his money where his mouth was, thus proving he wasn’t just blowing smoke, Gary wrote his phone number in my sketch book and commissioned me to produce a large drawing for him, which he added to his growing art collection. It was quite an honor, and something that still makes me feel all good ‘n’ sh!t.
I did believe that I was destined for big things. (And you can plainly see how that turned out.)
Gary Burghoff left the show at the beginning of Season 8, and later I got to know David Ogden Stiers a little bit (it was he who recommended I read John Steinbeck’s book ‘SWEET THURSDAY’, which I did). I always felt that Stiers was actually the best, most talented actor in the MASH cast.
There’s another episode in Season 10 in which I had a small, two-line part. I made a decision to deliver the lines as a façade, a deliberate attempt to cloak an altogether different motivation than what the lines superficially appeared to indicate.
The next day, David Ogden Stiers pulled me aside and said: “I just saw the dailies [meaning: footage of the previous day’s shooting unedited], and what you did was the very essence of acting.”
Coming as it did from the actor whom I considered to be the most talented MASH cast member, that was high praise, and I was totally thrilled by his remark. Hell, I’m STILL thrilled by it! I was surprised and honored that the best actor on MASH had recognized the “subtle, extra little layer of texture” I had added to a simple two-line part.
[NOTE: All these years later, I still find it peculiar when I reflect on what little guidance and input performers on MASH received. There were a couple of times when lines of dialogue or things I was given to perform could have been presented in a variety of different ways. Not once was I ever approached by a director, writer, or star and advised that “this way” or “that way” was the interpretation they were seeking or hoping for.]
THE EPISODE I SIMPLY HAD TO WATCH!
Not being a fan of MASH, I didn’t watch a lot of the episodes. Naturally, I made it a point to catch the ones where I had something to say or some “silent bit” that was important. But the rest of ‘em . . . eh, whatever! However, there was one show I made it a point to see. In the 8th season there was an episode titled ‘Dreams’.
Unless one had a small part in the show, he or she wouldn’t be in possession of a script, so one could only guess as to what the show was about based on the scenes he/she was working in.
I did not have a script for the ‘Dreams’ episode, and I remember watching all these highly unusual scenes being filmed and wondering: What in the hell is this episode about?
I was standing just beyond the camera’s view when that scene of Major Winchester dancing with lit sparklers in his hands was shot. I was just scratching my head in wonder.
They had opened the giant barn-like door of Stage 9 to shoot the scene with Father Mulcahy; all this LIGHT was filling the soundstage - I had never seen it so illuminated before, and I couldn’t imagine how all these things were going to be tied together to create a MASH episode. So I thought: OK, I simply MUST watch this episode when it airs!
As it turned out, I think ‘Dreams’ was one of the finest MASH episodes ever constructed.
BEHIND THE S*C*E*N*E*S AND UNDER THE SHEETS
I know some people would probably like me to dish some dirt. I really don’t have any to dish out. If there was any friction amongst the principals (and it’s nearly impossible to think there never was), it was all handled elsewhere; I never saw any arguments or ego explosions in my 5 years on the set.
The “juiciest” gossip I can come up with is that I felt Loretta Swit wore too much perfume; I could always smell her coming, and I knew where she had been long after she’d left. Sorry, that’s the best I gots!
Everyone got along with each other really well on the set and there truly was a kind of family-like atmosphere amongst the major players, the minor players, the technicians and even the caterer; it was an extremely friendly place to work and I only wish I had appreciated that gig more at the time.
Harry Morgan used to often tell stories of the “old Hollywood days” to his fellow stars, and I remember one time passing by an open door when I heard him saying to the others: “He couldn’t act his way out of a paper bag. They tried it once: they put him in a paper bag and he couldn’t act his way out of it”.
I thought that was really funny. To this day I don’t know who Harry Morgan was talking about and I’ve always regretted that I didn’t ask him later in the afternoon. But I loved that bit so much that I later stole it and used it against Nick Nolte when writing a review of the movie ‘Hotel Rwanda’.
There’s a lot of waiting around between shots on a movie or television set while the camera-work and the lighting is being worked out. I spent most of my “waiting time” either drawing in my sketch books (usually in the Mess Tent unless it was being used in the shot) or just lying on one of the cots in Hawkeye’s and Hunnicutt’s “Swamp”.
I took the job seriously, and was always standing by when I was needed for a scene, but I could basically tell by what they were currently shooting and how many pages of dialogue it entailed, how long it would be before I was needed, so slipping away to the “Swamp” for a little eye-rest was perfectly acceptable.
MASH was filmed in two places: Nearly all of the interiors were shot on Stage 9 at 20th Century Fox studio, and most of the exteriors were shot at Malibu Creek State Park.
I didn’t really like the Malibu shoots because it meant having to get up before the Sun did and driving 30-40 minutes up to Malibu along the Pacific Coast Highway in the dark. Once at the park, we would be shuttled in minivans about 15-minutes deeper into the canyon where the outdoor set was constructed.
True, getting the “Malibu call” meant a free, all-I-could-eat lunch provided by a good Hollywood caterer, but it also meant a long, full, busy day under the hot Sun in a dusty canyon.
I greatly preferred the Fox studio “Stage 9 call”, which was much more common. Fox was only about 15 minutes from my house, and sometimes it would mean a shorter work day.
The MASH production company spent Tuesday, December 9, 1980, shooting externals at its Malibu canyon location. The only reason I remember that so clearly is because that’s where I was when I saw the newspaper story that told of John Lenin's Lennon’s murder. I saw a newspaper lying on a bench in the Wardrobe Department, and for a good part of that morning, all the talk on the set was about Lennon having been shot and killed.
On Stage 9, the compound was set up just as it looked in Malibu, but it was slightly more compressed, meaning the tents and structures were a bit closer to each other in proximity due to space limitations.
The floor was rubberized with some very dark grey material so that many performers (i.e., soldiers, doctors, nurses) could walk around during a scene without their footsteps being picked up on the microphone that was recording the actors’ dialogue.
When you see a night scene taking place in the 4077th compound – even an EXTERNAL night scene - know that it was almost certainly filmed on Stage 9 at Fox. The external day scenes are from the Malibu Creek State Park canyon, while the external night scenes are on the stage at Fox studio, and if you concentrate on it, you will be able to notice that at night, all the tents at the 4077th are a little closer together than they are during the day shots.
The scenes I most disliked working in (and I worked in A LOT of them) were those filmed in the Operation Room. It seemed to me that most of the time the scenes we did in the O.R. were shot immediately after returning from lunch. So we’d return to the set after having eaten a lot of food, and immediately we young dudes would be placed under the sheets for “our operations”.
Well, you know what happens when it’s after noon and you’ve just eaten a lot of food, right? The body tends to want to “sleep it off”. And THAT’S when they’d most often put us on tables, cover us with sheets, and film these scenes that felt like they took forever.
Yeah, you can count on it: some of those patients in those scenes are really ASLEEP! As I recall, once or twice a take had to be reshot because some patient started snoring in the middle of an actor’s dialogue.
I never wanted to be “that guy” who started snoring during an O.R. scene. However, what I dreaded even more than ruining a take by snoring, was perhaps falling asleep and then having a natural, biological… uh, “guy” thang occur. Knowwhatahmean?
Believe me, that would have been noticed, and how do you ever “live something like that DOWN”?
So, I fought hard . . . er-- I mean, I tried to remain mentally alert as much as possible, so I wouldn’t fall asleep, wouldn’t snore, wouldn’t . . . snap to attention (even though I was “in the army now”).
More than once I thought to myself: Why do they always feel a need to shoot these O.R. scenes right after lunch? Is it a conspiracy agin us guys?
I think I probably dozed off a few times while under a sheet and under the knife in the O.R., but only momentarily – not long enough to do any damage to a scene or to my reputation.
THE E*N*D OF M*A*S*H
I still vividly recall the final scene of MASH. I was fully aware of the magnitude of the moment and of all the hype - it was impossible not to be, with all the reporters hanging around the set and all the film crews filming the MASH film crew.
But even so, it didn’t mean all that much to me at the time, and it wasn’t until many years later that I realized how special it was to have been in the last shot that the MASH production company ever did. When the director said, “Cut. Print. That’s a wrap!” MASH was over and done forever. And I was there.
The last MASH episode shown on TV was the 2+ hour special ‘Goodbye, Farewell, And Amen’. But that wasn’t the last thing ever shot. The concluding special was already “in the can” (i.e., filmed, edited, and ready for showing) before the last regular 30-minute episode (‘As Time Goes By’) was completed.
The final shot of ‘As Time Goes By’ involved the burying of a time capsule by the principal MASH characters. I was fortunate enough to have been selected to be one of the few nameless G.I.s who were gathered around during the time capsule burial ceremony.
Looking back all these decades later – after “Time Has Gone By” – I realize what an honor it was to be included in that final shot when one of television’s all-time most beloved shows brought its 11-Season run to an end.
Below is a YouTube video I found of those final minutes prior to the last shot on MASH. If you pause it right at 3:38, on the right edge of the frame you’ll see one blurry, dark-haired guy standing amongst three or four women (he’s not tall, but he’s the tallest one in that group). That guy is Yours Truly. (You can also barely see me from 7:10 to 7:20 standing directly behind Father Mulcahy and partially obscured by a camera lens.)
Last Day of filming
M*A*S*H : FOR ME, IT WAS A GOOD G*I*G
~ Stephen T. McCarthy
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