The Des Moines Register from Des Moines, Iowa • 93

People die including, in sitcom 'M A perhaps, a main clicracf er I I) lll ill llv ffitFn 111 Jiff Alda. "MASH" at the end of by DON SHIRLEY (c) 171, The WathlngtoA Pott Trapper John (drunk, packing toilet paper into his duffel bag): If I don't like a movie, I walk out in the middle. If I don't like a war, I leape. Hawkeye (not so drunk): Don't you want to see howjt ends? Trapper: Oh, but it doesn't end. It continues when it finishes here, they take it on the road.

From one of last year's "M'ASH," episodes. Not many people walked out in the middle of "MASH," the movie, when It was released in 1970. Critics cheered, and a public' that wanted to walk out on the Vietnam war swarmed to the box office. But who would have -thought that "MASH could be on the half-hour television comedy road and survive? People die in "MASH" possibly including, at the end of this TV season, one of the principal characters. Army doctors in the Korean war commit the seven deadly sins and general insubordination in the middle of a war zone.

They, and the audience, laugh at some of the institutions America holds nearest and dearest This is TV "sitcom" material? Robert Altman, who directed the movie, doesn't think so. "I abhor it," he says of the CBS series. "I don't care how well it's done. It's like saying we're going to be in an Asian war every Saturday night." Actually "MASH" is aired on Tuesday this season. Altman admits he has only seen "parts" of "five or six" episodes of the series.

Most Hollywood professionals disagree with Altman. Last year "MASH" won the best comedy series Emmy against the toughest competition ever mounted for that award. And public and professional taste have coincided. Almost two years after the Vietnam cease-fire, the Nielsen ratings' Top 10 list consistently reveals that "MASH," the TV show, is a smash. "MASH" is shot in two locations one on the 20th Century Fox ranch out In the hills, for the big exterior scenes, and another on Stage 9 on the Fox lot next to Century City.

The first thing you notice on Stage 9 is the mud on the floor. Except it's not really mud, you discover when you step on it. It's a rubber compound carpet. Everything else seems about as authentic as someone who has never been in the Army in Korea can imagine. And someone who was in the Army in Korea, Maj.

William Pfeifer, assures you that It's "a remarkably accurate job." Maj. Pfeifer is only passing through town; the show uses no official Army adviser, since such a title might also mean official Army interference. Maj. Pfeifer was recently a surgeon in the only Mobile Army Surgical Hospital left in Korea. Only now, he says it's called Surgical HospUal, Mobile Army.

SHMA. (However, a Pentagon spokesman in Washington reports that he still uses MASH.) Gene Reynolds and Larry Gelbart, the creators of the TV show, met Pfeifer last spring, when they traveled to Korea for five days of research. While there, recalls Pfeifer, the Hollywood big shots joined in the fun at the unit's" St. Patrick's party something involving a casket, a nurse and Reynolds dressed up as a priest. Just like on the show, says Pfeifer, "when you work hard, and when you party, you let it all hang out." Reynolds and Gelbart work hard at letting their show hang out.

In no other TV series have more words, scenes and ideas that were taboo on commercial TV a few years ago bounded more naturally across the screen. "The first year, there was a lot of stuff CBS objected to," recalls Gelbart. In the show's second season, "they wouldn't let us use But this season, the third, "we've done a show about circumcision. I think they have the feeling we can handle most everything." Of course some words still are not uttered, and "we do a lot of little hoy style dirty jokes," acknowledges Gelbart. Some fans of the like Robert Altman, want to know where all the blood has gone.

Less of the red stuff spurts across the operating room in the TV show than in the movie. "Possibly sometimes we underplay the blood," muses Gelbart. "But we don't think you can attract people by repelling them at the same time. We have to find something we and the audience can live with, week in and week out," which, is precisely the reason Altman is unhappy with the TV show. But Gelbart questions whether fountains of blood inherently make an antiwar statement.

"Showing an artery in the movie seemed like a filmmaker's success," he says. "I didn't think, 'War is Hell," but rather 'How did the filmmaker do There isn't much blood, but there is a laugh track inside the televised operating room something of a landmark for a top-rated comedy series that also doesn't have a live audience. Reynolds and Gelbart want to abolish the laugh track altogether, but CBS doesn't agree. Gelbart, casual and relaxed, is generally acknowledged as the major creative force behind the show. He supervises the "radical sur- Wayne Rogers (left) and Alan 3 Gary Burghoff stars as Radar O'Reilly.

but they sa'id, 'We're not going to tell you what to The show's makers are for it. "It would be a good demonstration of how wasteful war is," says Gelbart, to kill "someone the audience knows," as opposed to the anonymous soldiers who filed through the operating room. Harry Morgan, of "Drag- net" and "December will replace Stevenson as the conyiianding officer. Though Morgan already appeared as a loony, bigoted general in one "MASH" episode, his new, continuing character- will, like Blake, "have to tolerate a lot of unorthodox behavior," says Gelbart. "But beyond that, I want to make him as different as possible from Blake." Stevenson doesn't think replacing Blake should be too difficult.

"I'm only running it (the unit) because I'm older and I've been a.doctor longer. Maybe they could turn to a real pro," suggested Stevenson. "I use all this" military stuff as an excuse for not knowing what I'm doing." He knows, though, that the viewers are going to feel it if he gets killed. "When I was fired as Doris Day's boss," he recalls, referring to another series he was on, "they said I was and nobody cared. Here they'll care, especially about the relationship between Blake and Radar." I A r.

Radar O'Reilly, the virginal young corporal who anticipates all of Blake's words, is played by Gary Burghoff, 31, who is the only person who appeared in both the movie and TV versions of "MASH." Don't ask him to compare the experiences, i though. He'll tell you it's like trying to compare "painting and sculpture" or "opera and blues." He will defend the television version against some of Altman's criticisms. Not enough visible blood? "You don't have to see the man's guts," maintains Burghoff, "to know from Hawkeye's face that the man is bleeding. The audience is allowed to imagine what's happening." Altman charges -that the TV show "sticks in two-bit antiwar messages" that don't really say anything. Burghoff concedes that because of the shooting schedule, "sometimes depth is lacking, but spontaneity contains brilliance, too." Perhaps no one is as convinced about the validity of the show's political statement as Alan Alda.

who won last year's "super-Emmy" as the best actor in a television series for his portrayal of Hawkeye, one of the surgeons. Others are played by Wayne Rogers (Trapper) and Larry Linville (Maj. Burns). When he accepted the role, says Alda, "I didn't want the show to be a commercial for war. I didn't want it to take a neutral position toward war.

I wanted to make sure it didn't portray war as a fun thing." He is satisfied. Yet he is not willing to let the show be pigeonholed as "antiwar," ei-ther. "It's pro-human rather than anti-afiything," he says. bias is for the people, whether they're victimized by war, bureaucracy, hypocrisy, whatever. It's about the variety of ways get lost to systems, to non-human concerns, to over-organization." Has the show's popularity surprised Alda? "The audience is not stupid," he replies.

"They appreciate class." McLean Stevenson will leave the season. says is performed on every script. When Reynolds asked him to help write the "MASH" pilot, he recalls, he was concerned that it not beco.me-just another service comedy. He is satisfied. "MASH" is closer to how it really is," he says, "given the don't in commercial TV." "Our doctors are more human," says Gelbart.

"The thing they had to do young men operating on young men was very distateslul to them. They're not soldiers. They're and when people try' to, make them sol--diers, there's a conflict that produces some real drama ai comedy." They escape, he says, "by drinking when there's nothing else to do, by making jokes about the patients' guts, about each others abilities. They're funny and they're smart we can do jokes about both Kafka and rations." However, "the writing pool in Hollywood Is very shallow," says Gelbart. And "thi is a very difficult show to write.

The scripts are terribly orchestrated to particular people. There's a real blur between the characters and actors." The show's episodic structure, in which several plots co-exist within one half-hour, offers advantages and disadvantages. "What's easier," notes Gelbart, "is not having to sustain a story for 35 pages. What's difficult is making it all hang together, making A cross just after meeting Gelbart crosses A and in the script, but Reynolds is in charge of the final editing mixing the visual phrases that have been formed out of the letters of the script into a perfectly timed entity. A "We're very supportive of each other," says Stevenson, who plays Lt.

Col. Henry Blake. "There's some real loving and caring on this show Stevenson, however, is no longer part of that loving and caring. He has signed a contract with NBC, where he wants to become a variety show host, and in the last of this season's "MASH," Blake will finally get his discharge, probably to be killed in an airplane crash on the way home. A less traumatic ending has also been shot, and 20th Century Fox, which owns the show, will make the final decision on Blake's death, which would be a first for a continuing character in a comedy series.

Gelbart is hesitant to discuss the issue, since he doesn't want advance publicity of the possible death scene to frighten away viewers. "I know most people don't like the idea, but most people don't like death itself," notes Gelbart. "CBS wasn't for it, Des MoinM Sunday Register Jaouary 19, 1975 13-TV.