The main corridor between the San Fernando Valley and the Westside of Los Angeles will be closed starting tonight all through the weekend. The traffic should be so bad that even though I’m currently in Palo Alto, we should still have grid lock. Anyway, here are some Friday questions to ponder while LA people frantically try to get out of town, and non-LA people laugh hysterically.
Gazzoo starts us off:
Your final writing credit for MASH was “Goodbye Radar”, apparently written as the 7th season finale but held back (at the network’s request) till the 8th season. Did Gary Burghoff or anyone have special requests for the episode in terms of storyline or particular scenes? And by the time the episode was produced you and David were no longer the head writers, did the new regime tinker with your script at all? Any other tidbits?
No one had any special requests, but David and I were very adamant that we didn’t want a sappy ending. That’s why we constructed the final sequence so that all of the final goodbyes were during triage and the farewells had to be quick and on the run.
I’m a big fan of “little touches”. Hawkeye discovering Radar’s teddy bear on his bed says more about how Radar matured from the MASH experience than any speech could have ever done, no matter how eloquently it was written.
We also wanted to send Radar home happy. Henry Blake was killed and Frank went bonkers. We wanted Radar to return home having benefited somewhat from the experience. He grew up and found love in Korea.
Originally it was a just a single episode but when CBS decided to push it back into the 8th season they asked that it be expanded into a two-parter.
The new staff rewrote very very little of our draft (thanks for that, guys). I don’t believe a line was changed from the entire final act. One day I’ll get Gary Burghoff to write about the episode from his perspective.
Richard Leslie Lewis is a British writer who just came back from a BBC Writers’ Festival. Showrunners there claimed they only wanted to see original specs. So here’s his question:
Why do American companies insist on writers specing current shows?
Because we want to see how you write other peoples’ shows. Can you capture the tone and style? Do your characters sound like the actual characters on the show? Yes, everyone is looking for that fresh new voice, but in America, more than likely, your first job (or several jobs) will be toiling on someone else’s show. Can you adapt to their vision?
Mirror James (also from England) wonders:
Steven Moffat and Russell T. Davies, his predecessor on Doctor Who, often seem to be the targets of abuse from people who claim to be fans. Everything from saying they can't write to accusations of running a so-called "gay agenda", in which the mere acknowledgement that gay people exist is apparently "shoving it down their throats".
Have you ever had a bad experience with a fan who claims to love a show yet can't seem to do anything other than hurl insults?
Only all the time. Fans are passionate about their shows. I got a hate letter on MASH from someone who thought Hawkeye was being too mean to Radar. Other loyal MASH viewers claimed in profanity-laced missives that I was a liberal Commie dupe hell bent on destroying America.
The "gay agenda" complaint was a staple on FRASIER. Referring to this and the "we're too liberal" charge on MASH, I like to think we had an "open minded agenda".
My favorite was a letter I received when David and I were showrunning the MARY series. It started out like this:
Dear Producers,
Recently I read an article in TV GUIDE that spoke of the growing cocaine problem in the television industry. At first I thought they were grossly exaggerating, but then I watched an episode of your show…
I will say this though – no one ever called me an “asshat”.
And finally, from Chris:
How do they shoot/do those scenes when the audience laughs just when the camera zooms on something, like a silent opening with the camera zooming on what a character is reading and just then the audience starts to laugh?
I assume you mean a studio audience. There are always monitors overhead and they will be invited to watch them for particular scenes or moments. Often special scenes will be pre-shot and just shown to the audience. What they see is what you’ll see at home so they receive the same surprise.
What’s your question?
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