Summer rerun

I don't know if I will get to a post later. Been fairly busy at work and a client's due any minute, and I have no idea if the office is closing any earlier for Juneteenth than it usually does on summer Fridays.

So I'm just going to recycle a post from just over seven years ago, back in the early failing days of LJ.  I still cross-post there, and occasionally read Friends entries there that don't show up here, including a bunch of RSS feeds I set up when I was a paid subscriber and could do that.  One is the Blogger feed of longtime TV writer Ken Levine. He's written, directed and showrun for any number of legendary (and not-so-legendary) shows, been a radio baseball play-by-play announcer, and always has an interesting perspective on things from the worlds of television, theater and film.

A long-running feature of his blog is Friday questions: you post 'em, he maybe answers 'em.  I didn't ask mine for this week until it probably was too far down the queue; for what it's worth, here's what I asked, which has nothing to do with the 2013 rerun:

( Dear Ken: )

Among the questions Ken did answer this morning was this one:

Did you ever a witness an unforseen event onstage that resulted in a decent take which was later aired?

He mentioned a show I have no recollection of whatsoever, Lateline starring a pre-Senate and pre-Scandal Al Franken.  But I immediately thought of a scene from M*A*S*H, which I mentioned in a (still-in-moderation) comment on today's post. In looking for the exactitudes of what happened, I found my own LJ post from 2013, inspired by the death that year of Allan Arbus, the longtime portrayer of Dr. Sidney Freedman on the show.

In its entirety:

"Ladies and gents, take my advice - pull down your pants and slide on the ice."

Those were perhaps the most iconic words ever spoken by Allan Arbus in his long-standing recurring role as Dr. Sidney Freedman on the M*A*S*H television show.  He was only a year or two younger than my parents, and his acting grew out of an original vocation as a photographer. Like many of his Greatest Generation, Arbus served in the military and thus was prepared to act out its horrors as depicted not far from the front lines at the 4077th.  He analyzed Jesus Christ, had a longtime running gag with Colonel Flagg, and was there at the end with Hawkeye in "Goodbye, Farewell and Amen."

And now he's back playing poker with Flagg, Colonel Blake and even Frank Burns. Probably Flagg is still bugging him about never signing his loyalty card:

Colonel Flagg: Col. Potter, this man, this American, never signed his Officer's Loyalty Oath. And I intend to see that he's be thrown out of the service.

Hawkeye: Very smart, Sidney.

B.J.: Where do we go to not sign?

Colonel Flagg: Oh, no. You think you're real smart. But you're not smart; you're dumb. Very dumb. But you've met your match in me.

Abbysinnia, Allan:(

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Although this talented actor breathed life into Sidney Freedman, he was probably created in the equally brilliant mind of the original series showrunner (as he'd today be known), Larry Gelbart.  Larry makes an appearance in the waning pages of Carl Reiner's memoir, as he describes a merry band of five couples- Carl, Larry, Norman Lear, Dom DeLuise, and Mel Brooks and their wives- all getting together in a running private-to-them social club they called "Yememvelt" and doing incredibly silly things to, with and about each other.

He ends the chapter by noting that, as of its writing, exactly one of each couple had been taken from this mortal coil: Reiner's, Brooks's and Lear's wives, and also Dom and Larry.  (That appears to still be the case.*)  While the other four men at that Round Table are probably the most famous, Larry's the only one I ever interacted with in real life.

Okay, something close to real life.

In the wild-west days of the early Internet in the late 1990s, Usenet groups provided much of the function that blogs and social media do now.  Buried in that hierarchy was a special place called alt.tv.mash; before groups got bought and destroyed by spammers and Google, it was an open-door forum to get word about, and even from, the participants in their areas of interest.

Larry Gelbart was a proud and regular contributor to the group. He went by "elsig" (his initials sounded out), and he was always generous and thorough in his answers to fan questions and his observations about the show during and after his early-year involvement.  His story of the Henry Blake death episode remains one of the most touching I've ever read, and I read it first on that newsgroup:

 

[T]here was no precedent for the last episode of our third season, in which the character of Colonel Henry Blake died. Naturally, CBS did not want us to "kill" the Henry Blake character, played by McLean Stevenson. They were most upset about that, and so was sentimental, dear old Twentieth Century-Fox. Killing a character in a half-hour show had never been done before. That was all the reason [producer] Gene [Reynolds] and I needed to know we would have to do it.

We resolved that instead of doing an episode in which yet another actor leaves yet another series, we would try to have Mac/Henry's departure make a point, one that was consistent with the series's attitude regarding the wastefulness of war; we would have that character die as a result of the conflict. After three years of showing faceless bit players and extras portraying dying or dead servicemen, here was an opportunity to have a character die that our audience knew and loved, one whose death would mean something to them.

Gene and I worked out a story entitled "Abyssinia, Henry" ... we distributed the finished script to the cast and various production departments, but removed the last page, which called for Radar to enter the O.R. and read a Defense Department communiqué that informs everyone that Henry Blake, who had been discharged and was flying back to his family in the States, had gone down in the Sea of Japan. "There weren't no survivors," he concludes.

I kept that one last page under wraps, locking it in my desk drawer. The only cast member let in on the secret was Alan Alda, by then clearly the star of the series. We planned the production schedule for this episode so that the O.R. scene would be the last one shot. There were, in fact, two O.R. sequences in that show: one at the top of the show, in which Henry is informed by Radar that he, Henry, is going home, that he has received his discharge orders, whereupon everyone in the room breaks into raucous song; the second, of course, was the final scene in which Radar enters to read the communiqué announcing Henry's death. After we shot the first scene, the one in which Henry gets the good news, the cast and crew, understandably, began to wrap, pulling the plug on the episode and for that matter, the whole season.

There were a great many visitors on the set: spectators, press, family, friends, easily a couple of hundred people. We asked everyone to wait a few minutes before joining us in the traditional wrap party, that we had one more piece of business to finish. I had couple of words privately with Billy Jurgensen, our cinematographer, told him what was up, and asked him to position his camera for the one additional scene. I did not want to rehearse it; we would shoot it only once. Then, Gene and I took the cast aside and I opened a manila envelope that contained the one-page last scene, telling them I had something I wanted to show them.

"I don't want to see it!" Gary Burghoff exploded. "I know you! You've got pictures of dead babies in there!"

Assuring him I didn't, I gave each [actor] a copy of the scene to read to themselves. Each had a different reaction.

"F**king brilliant," said Larry Linville.

"You son of a bitch," Gary said to McLean. "You'll probably get an Emmy out of this!"

Mac, who had stayed to watch the filming of what he knew was his last M*A*S*H , was speechless. But that doesn't begin to say it.

We returned to the set. For once I said "Action" instead of "Cut." We began to shoot the scene. Gary was unbelievably touching as he entered the busy O.R. and read the message to all the doctors and nurses. Extras in the scene, performers who had been with series since day one, reacted with a kind of heartfelt sincerity that was stunning — their performance was based on their real surprise and lingering shock, their awareness of how much Mac meant to them. The crew, hearing of Henry's death for the first time as the cameras were rolling, stuck to their chores; they did all one could ask of them.

Unhappily, there was some sort of technical glitch. Either the boom mike or a light or whatever could go wrong did, and we had to shoot it again. I was heartsick. Gary would never be able to do a second take as beautiful as he did the first. I still knew nothing about directing. He was better. And on the second go, a totally unexpected thing happened. After Gary finished reading his message, there was a hushed silence on the set as B.J.'s camera panned the stricken faces of the cast, and then someone off-camera accidentally let a surgical instrument drop to the floor. It was perfect, that clattering, hollow sound, filling a palpable void in a way that no words could. I could not have planned it better; I wish I had — whenever I happen to hear it again, I marvel at how perfectly it fit.



That story worked its way into Gelbart's own memoir from 1999, Laughing Matters. It also told much more of his own history that I hadn't known, and a lot about the process of writing for the stage or screen. A longtime online friend of mine had an occasion around then, and I got her a copy of the book for whatever it was, but I first contacted elsig and asked him for an inscription of sorts for it. I know he gave me one, but for the life of me I can't remember what it said. (I long lost touch with the friend and just recontacted her this morning in hopes that she remembers the words.)

In thinking of all this today, I realized that Larry had pulled one over on me all those years ago.  I've always taken the title of his memoir as a riff on the stern speech of mother, principal or drill sergeant, as in "this is no laughing matter."

But no. Look at it again:



Look at those faces. Listen to their humor. See how your own face reacts.

Yes. In that title, "matters" is also a verb:)

Abyssinia, Ken:)

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* ETA. Well, not so true anymore. Carl Reiner and Dom's wife Carol passed last year, Larry's wife in 2018. Norman Lear and Mel Brooks are blessedly still with us.