Question marks of the Abyss

[sholio]

One of the ??? of the Abyss is probably looking for vintage memorabilia on Ebay, which is how I came into possession of this:



It's from the 1980s, and I am having a GREAT time with it. I wasn't really sure what would be inside, and I figured I would enjoy it, but even in an era when photo books and BTS stuff are a dime a dozen, this is really nice.



It's absolutely full of photos, there are interviews with all the cast members, brief descriptions of every episode (I can only think how much I would have loved that back in the era when you couldn't just go on Wikipedia and look up episode lists), a fairly comprehensive "how the series got made" chapter, and brief summary interviews with the writers/producers on what they were trying to accomplish with each season. Some highlights below the cut.


There were several big shifts in mood and direction across the seasons. One of the most interesting to me is that from about season 6 onward, they were running out of ideas for unique plots that could happen in a war zone, so they shifted over to doing more character-focused episodes, where it wasn't really a focus on "X thing happens" but rather "how would this character respond to X."

The first season, there was a lot of network interference, because the show's ratings were very shaky and the network wanted a Hogan's Heroes-esque military comedy, so they had to essentially fight creatively for everything they wanted. The turnaround came with "Sometimes You Hear The Bullet" in season one (the one where Hawkeye's childhood friend dies on the operating table) where they were allowed to play with dark/sad themes for the first time - someone dies in surgery for the first time on the show, and the characters react to it with more emotional realism than they'd really had up to that point.

Season two was when the show became a breakout hit and they started being able to do more of what they wanted. Between seasons 2-3, the showrunners went to Korea, visited a MASH unit (which were still operating, obviously more like regular hospitals at that point) and talked to a bunch of veterans and surgeons, and the show started a swing towards more realistic plots and more of an in-depth look at how war affects the people in it.

Around that time, they also started soliciting veterans to send them real incidents to use in the show, for which submitters were paid a small sum if they ended up using it. A bunch of the random side stuff in later episodes is apparently from this, including some things I would never have guessed were based on real incidents, such as the party the camp throws for Hawkeye where they dye their hair and everything else red.

Some of the things they had the most trouble with were sexual content and scatological humor. Evidently jokes about latrines were widespread in the real war(s) that the show was based on, but they couldn't use any of it because the network wouldn't let them, and they also had to clamp down on plots that made it too obvious the characters were having promiscuous sex. (Honestly I've been impressed, watching the show, how much they did actually get away with on that front.) There was also a political swing through the course of the show as Alan Alda became an outspoken feminist and the show began to move away from the rampant skirt-chasing, rape jokes, and similar content of earlier seasons. (One of the interviewed showrunners said he regrets some of that content now.)

The episode descriptions are nothing to write home about and often are only focused on one of the episode's plotlines and leave out the others, but I liked how creatively they're written. Most of them are in the form of little third-person narratives, and the ones for episodes that were based around a character writing home or receiving letters are often in the form of a letter; for example, this is the entire summary for "The Party" in season 7:



There are pages and pages of photos, I can't possibly summarize it all. Most are just episode photography, but there are also quite a lot of behind-the-scenes ones, or pulled back so you can see the crew while they're filming. This one from "Dreams" suggests that they filmed a scene with Hawkeye in Margaret's dream that didn't make it into the actual episode:



I also particularly loved this shot of the set, because while they do film outdoors quite a bit, I hadn't realized that there was also an "outdoor" soundstage set with a painted scenery backdrop!



Unfortunately the glare in the camera shot obscures some of it; maybe there are pictures online ...

The book talks about how they had to fight, early on, to be able to do all the outside stuff they wanted to do - they have Jeeps and helicopters and a full outdoor set, which was wildly unusual for a sitcom at the time, or even now.

The cast interviews are also really enjoyable, although they're all over the place - some of the actors really loved the experience, some were very unhappy when they left, some talk more about the experience of being on the show and some were more about their characters.

Some highlights:

• Wayne Rogers (Trapper) liked the cast and the work, but was unhappy from the first season because he felt he was being upstaged by Alda and he never had any development for his character. He started asking what direction for his character was intended and threatening to walk from the end of the first season. (I did know this already but it's kind of sad to see how limiting he found it and how little his character was allowed to do, with the spotlight on Hawkeye.)


• Larry Linville (Frank), on the other hand, seems to have been more serious about playing Frank than the show was. He said he tried to bring out the character's vulnerability and describes playing him as a sort of razor-walk where it was really easy to miss what he was trying to achieve. He eventually left because he didn't really feel like he could do much more with him.


• I get the feeling that once the actors who were unhappy had left, the remaining cast gelled pretty well - they seem to have really enjoyed working with each other and genuinely liked each other and even the ones who had problems talk about what a positive experience it was on the whole.


• Mike Farrell (BJ) was cast on the basis of a chemistry read with Alda. The weekend before he was supposed to start filming, Alda invited him out to his place and they stayed up all night talking about their characters and what they wanted for them.


• David Ogden Stiers (Charles) focused a lot on his character in his interview. Highlights: that Charles doesn't believe he's good enough to live up to his family, and sets his goals extremely high because of that and struggles to prove himself a lot of the time; and a big part of his arc is learning to live where he is and rely on the people around him, and not have his life centered 12,000 miles away.


• The prank war episode where Charles instigates a prank battle between his roommates and Margaret, and they end up teaching him a lesson by counter-pranking him, was based on something that actually happened backstage. The cast all pranked each other a lot, and David was one of the big instigators as both a pranker and a victim, and at one point when he'd pranked the whole cast they decided to counter-prank him by convincing him that people were really mad at each other because of it and staging a fake fight on set, which led to him coming clean about exactly what he had been up to. Then the whole thing turned into a episode (though it sounds like the IRL version was friendlier).


• Jamie Farr (Klinger) absolutely loved his wardrobe; he got to basically wear everything the studio had from actress's wardrobes in other productions that would fit him, and he had a good time. In his first scene he played it very camp, they looked at the dailies and were like "naaahhhh" and had him do the scene again playing it very straight, and that was what they ended up going with for the character.

Oddly Alan's interview was one of the least interesting out of the bunch; he mostly just talks about how he got the role and the difficulty of being separated from his wife, who was living on the opposite coast for most of the time that the show was filming. And there's not a McLean Stevenson interview at all, unless I just missed it when I was flipping through the book. (They're interspersed throughout the episode guide section.)

I think those are some of the things that mainly jumped out at me. Let me know if there's anything you want me to look up!

Comments

[madripoor_rose]

Very cool!

Um, a little warning here. Do NOT get the original MASH novels, they are nothing like the show and sexist racist garbage.

[sholio]

Haha, I already know that from when I was a teenager, but thanks for the warning. (I remember being very shocked when I watched the movie in my teens and it was nothing like the show and also way racier than anything I was used to seeing at that age!)

[madripoor_rose]

So many rape jokes. The origin of Trapper John's name kept in the show is bad enough but I'm almost amazed those books were even published!

[pauraque]

Nice! On the question of how they got away with as much as they did... Back in the '90s I used to go on alt.tv.mash, where Larry Gelbart was a regular poster, and it was a common occurrence for a fan to ask him about how they got away with some particular line, and his answer was usually "The network censors didn't know what it meant."

[sholio]

AHAHAHA. I figured that was probably most of it, or at least that they kept it on the plausibly deniable down-low. The episodes use a lot of innuendo but you rarely (never?) see anyone actually getting undressed or getting into bed or otherwise in a situation that wouldn't go over a kid's head - or apparently a network censor's head either.

[pauraque]

One I remember coming up more than once, and I can't recall the episode, but it's where Hawkeye comes in and Margaret is using a massager on Frank's back, and Hawkeye says something like, "I've always said, behind every great man there's a woman with a vibrator." Nobody could believe the censors didn't get what the innuendo was there, but according to Larry Gelbart they did not!

[philomytha]

I adore Klinger and his wardrobe and I feel like playing him very straight was a great choice. Also fascinated that the red dye party was based on a real thing, I would never have guessed but I suppose it does have that 'nobody would believe this in a story' kind of offbeat weirdness that real life does...

[sholio]

Totally agreed about Klinger! And yeah, it's fascinating to find out the red dye party was based on a real incident because I found it logistically hard to believe in the episode - but as you say, real life is often weirder than fiction!

[silverflight8]

I see you are enjoying exploring the rabbit hole warren XD Cute!!

[sholio]

It's so cozy down here in this rabbit warren. :D

[silverflight8]

You are NOT going to get me. (Tho not because it doesn't sound appealing bc it does... I'm just not great at watching tv haha)

[sholio]

Ahahaha. I completely understand; there are some canons I'm completely safe from because I just don't do that type of media (like podcasts)! (Also 11 seasons of a show from the 1970s is not a small commitment.)

[timespirt]

Sounds like a great book.

[sholio]

I enjoyed it!

[lunabee34]

I love learning all these tidbits about the show and the actors.

[sholio]

I am having a great time with this book. Another thing I forgot to mention above is that they kept the ending to the Henry's death episode under wraps and didn't even tell most of the actors; they were just told that they were coming in to film a tag scene in the OR. Then they sprang it on them to get their actual reactions.

[lunabee34]

Oh wow. That episode is just heart-rending.

[nocowardsoul]

One of the fun things about the MASH fandom is that people acquire scripts and post them in part or in full. The script for Dreams is in this folder and it has Margaret's dream with Hawkeye and other details.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16mxZ6iVDXbbJSyVb4Hxdeo2vY-Jbdu2b

[sholio]

Ooooooooo!! Thank you so much, this is great! I foresee downloading in my future.