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Mutual respect between cast and crew was what the foundation of M*A*S*H was built on
"I was grateful, on an hourly basis, for the thoughtful restraint shown by the cast," wrote executive producer Larry Gelbart.
Plenty of actors are talented. However, many of us forget that a good actor isn’t just talented; their career is the result of hard work and good faith placed in those around them.
When Larry Gelbard and Gene Reynolds established the team of actors that would soon become the cast of the 4077th on M*A*S*H, they had no idea just how lucky they were.
Gelbart recalled the team of actors in his memoir, Laughing Matters. Of the main cast, many of them had cut their teeth working in the theatre, a level of experience that the producer believed was integral to the quality of their work ethic.
“Of enormous advantage to us was the fact that many of our actors, for example Alan Alda, Gary Burghoff (Radar), and Larry Linville (Frank Burns), had stage training,” wrote Gelbart. “Their respect for the text was exceptional. Nothing in a script - not one word - was ever changed without first asking permission, nor were changes suggested merely for the sake of changing.”
Of course, Gelbart wasn’t blindly faithful to the script. Just as his actors had faith in his words, he too had faith in them to turn his script into something that felt natural and genuine. He acknowledged that part of the creative process was, indeed, reworking scenes on the fly.
“As invariably happens, a certain alchemy takes place when literature becomes drama, when written material is read aloud,” wrote Gelbart. “Some combinations of words do not sit well on the tongue; what works for the eye works differently for the ear. If necessary, script adjustments would often continue right through the filming period, on into post-production, where actors could read new lines in a recording studio, lines that would be put into the mouths of their onscreen images, or laid in on the soundtrack, so that they were heard off-camera.”
With so many moving parts, the cast and crew of M*A*S*H became a well-oiled machine. “I was grateful, on an hourly basis, for the thoughtful restraint shown by the cast, which saw each episode’s script as the script for that episode and not as a springboard for improvement or improvisation,” wrote Gelbart. “Our actors were always content to leave the writing to the writers, while they concentrated on the acting.”
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