Larry Gelbart on killing off "Henry Blake" on "M.A.S.H" - EMMYTVLEGENDS.ORG

when Mac made it very clear that he didn't want to be on the show anymore for the fourth year and the fifth year and we said okay you know we'll we'll adjust which I in a sense was you know another's I think emblematic of a simpler time a Fox and I think CBS were well within their rights to say no you're staying you know otherwise we have a log action here which in fact happened when Wayne Rogers left there was you know a lot of legal papers there were a lot of legal papers flying back and forth it never came to anything but when that happened gene and I thought that we should use the departure of the character in some meaningful fashion and mash was not about everybody having a good time match was not about happy endings and we decided that his character could not should but could die um the expression Abyssinia henry comes from a flapper era 20s era expression for Abyssinia meaning i'll be seeing you kind of corny but then Henry Blake was County corny he thought it was perfectly in keeping in character with the character um we assigned the script to a writing team who done a lot of work for mash continued to Jim Fritz Ellen evergreen bum we told him what we wanted we wanted it to be essentially a goodbye episode in which people shared their feelings no big tension no big storyline and we said we wanted him to die at the end and but we and we swore them to secrecy everybody the only people who knew about it were Burton Metcalfe gene and nyan and the writers and when they brought the episode in we detach that page and did not distribute it and we rehearse the episode we shot the episode I did something I directed it as it turned out it was my turn in the box and I did the one sort of directorial touch I've ever done in my life that no one ever notices and but with just a kind of a pleasure for me to do I whenever a Henry was seen in his office there was always the skeleton behind him as though it foretold what might happen to the character without tipping it without giving it away the reason we kept it a secret was we did our primary reason was to keep the actors from being influenced by that information if they started to film the show knowing that Henry was a dead man by the end of the episode their performances would have been quite different it would have colored their performances good as they are you can't help it because they would have been dealing with their emotions as people as co-workers of MacLean Stephenson it would have been it wasn't effect we devoutly desired not to have so we shot every scene in that episode and we were at the point where normally you say It's A Wrap it would have been a wrap for the show and a wrap for that season the third season but I asked everybody to just wait one minute and I said could you just relight the o.r the operating room and they went about doing that and gene and I took the cast over to one side sat them down and said look we were going to do something that you don't know about I should say that we did tell Alan Alda that we were going to do this by that time was pretty well established that Alan was the star of the show and it just seemed right that he know about this um and so I had to spend a lot of elope with the last page in it that they'd never seen Anna and I started opening and gary said don't don't Gary burghoff set up I know what's in there it's pictures of dead babies I said no there's no dead babies in here I wouldn't do that anybody and I gave them each a copy and they looked at it and they were really it's not often in your life that you see people stunned and they really could not believe what was on the page and Larry Linville said brilliant I'll give you a clean version Larry Linville said brilliant and Gary burghoff looked at McLean Stevenson you'll probably win the any Gary burghoff looked at MacLaine Steven and he said you'll probably win the Emmy for this year's son of a McClane didn't say anything to sort of it really threw him anyway with that we went back into the set there were about a couple hundred people easily on the stage because it was our last show of the season and that always attracted a crowd some press some families of family and I said to Bill Jorgenson who was our camera director I said this is what we're going to do so it's set up for this it was all it was described that the awards in progress we panned to the to the doors Gary burghoff comes in he's got a telegram in his hand and he reads the message about Henry bikes plane going down on the sea of japan' spun into the Sea of Japan there weren't no survivors and he said okay nobody watching none of the crew none of the extras no one knew what was coming and so everybody took their places and I said action and Gary came through and did this incredible beautiful heartbreaking I'm Marlon just write on reading of the line then we panned over to the doctors who just kept operating look couldn't look at each other just had to work and I said cut and BJ the camera back in when we said we have to do it again in the meantime the reaction of the people there was and so what happened he said we didn't get this there was a show here the inevitable gremlins that creep in the best moments and I thought Gary will never ever be this good again and I walked him around in the back to his starting spot and I said okay and I and this is why Gary it was so brilliant second time acting but acting from a real emotion acting from how he really felt he was able to do it just as brilliantly because he meant what he was saying it's not as though he had to get up for that part this was he had to sum up how he felt about mcclain leaving and he it wasn't death in the in the show family so action and he came through he did the line and we pan and as we pan a scalpel dropped quite by accident unplanned and was perfect because it pierced the silence no pun intended and it sort of reminded everybody what these people were about these were people who use these sharp things to do things to people who have been hit by other sharp things and we went to Wayne and Allen and they sort of looked at each other could hoax their eyes they were masked they were operating and they went back to the work just work work working I was had cut and that was it Wayne rather I'm sorry McLain was so touched that he went to his dressing room I didn't know but he cried for about two hours he was just so it's as though we did kill him you know there was not the intended effect we had a wrap party we had food we had this we had that he didn't come to the party and of course we talked a lot about what we had just done we had a hard time convincing CBS and 20 Century Fox that we could do it we put that into the tag I spoke earlier about this PostScript usually we didn't put important scenes in the tag because they could always be cut out in syndication and you never see them again you know but this one we saved so that if anybody felt it was too much or they didn't want to do it they had the option but I think it was it was a very grown-up thing to do a very sensible thing to we had hundreds of letters from viewers saying you tricked us you sucked us and we thought this was a comedy show out dare you toy with our feelings that all those letters are in the Smithsonian Institute and I'm very proud of that you you and Jane responded we responded we wrote literally hundreds of letters and not to sound I mean that the blower horns too loudly we hand wrote each letter because we wanted to show that we cared enough about what they cared about that the scent of a form letter and we said why we did it and we pointed out that that same week that this fictional character died in Korea a plane load of Vietnamese children taking off from Saigon to come to America had crashed and they all perished and I said not meaning I mean I couched it but the idea was I hope you felt the same way about them as you did somebody who really doesn't exist you

Channel: FoundationINTERVIEWS

Views: 1,230,705

Rating: 4.8309193 out of 5

Keywords: Television history, Interviews, Video interviews, Emmy TV Legends

Id: g3Rh2EkQWhw

Length: 9min 53sec (593 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 17 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/whitcwa]

It was a great plot element. You shouldn't have a comedy about war without acknowledging that people die. Many deaths and injuries are not due to combat. Accidents and illness took a large toll in earlier wars.

[u/DootDotDittyOtt]

I love that show. My whole family watched it together. The collective gasp and tears that followed that episode. My brother called it. Not necessarily the death, but he just said, something doesn't seem right about the send off.

[u/MadLintElf]

Doesn't surprise me, that show was so real in the way that it depicted the war, it wasn't until I was a young adult that I realized the theme song for the show was called Suicide is Painless.

Spent years humming that tune never realizing what it really meant.

[u/Lampmonster]

Reminds me of Martin's response after Lady got killed in Game of Thrones. He tweeted something like "The dog that plays Lady is fine, as is the young boy who was killed in the episode that nobody seems upset over."

[u/theqofcourse]

Here are some great details about how the scene was shot from Larry Gelbart's book "Laughing Matters" (grabbed from Snopes' page "The cast of M*A*S*H did not learn of Col. Blake's death until they were actually filming the scene in which it was announced"- False.) :

​

[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.

​

[u/Scrappy_Larue]

Aside from reminding the audience that war is terrible, Blake's death was even more about giving McLean Stevenson a kick in the ass on the way out the door. He had a verbal agreement that he could return to the show if his next project didn't work out. The character's death made that impossible.

[u/PoxyMusic]

I remember when a Vietnamese refugee kid showed up at my elementary school in northern CA in 1976. Kids pretty much left him alone, I sure wish we’d been friendlier. Poor kid, just think about what he’d gone through.

One of the few times I did the right thing was a year later, when a bully started shoving him around saying that “my dad died in Vietnam, ya fucking gook”. I don’t know why, but the bully guy was ok with me and when I told him that the other kid was from south Vietnam, he backed off.

I think about him still, I hope things went ok for him.

[u/gonzoisgood]

I love MASH. When the chicken turned out to be a baby I LOST MY SHIT.

[u/juniperhill18]

I cried when Henry’s plane went down over the sea.