Jeff & Ryan welcome Dan Wilcox to the MASH Matters Podcast! Along with his partner, Thad Mumford, Dan Wilcox wrote 17 episodes of M*A*S*H, beginning with the award-winning Are You Now, Margaret? and ending with Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen. Dan talks about his long, illustrious career that took him from Captain Kangaroo and Sesame Street to the 4077th and beyond.
Episodes written by Dan Wilcox & Thad Mumford
Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen (1983)
As Time Goes By (1983)
Settling Debts (1982)
Bombshells (1982)
Heroes (1982)
Wheelers and Dealers (1981)
Identity Crisis (1981)
Bless You Hawkeye (1981)
Depressing News (1981)
A War for All Seasons (1980)
Death Takes a Holiday (1980)
Back Pay (1980)
Goodbye, Cruel World (1980)
Bottle Fatigue (1980)
Captains Outrageous (1979)
Nurse Doctor (1979)
Are You Now, Margaret? (1979)
M*A*S*H Notes
Loretta Swit now has an official website!
Guess who stopped by the Toledo Mudhens’ souvenir shop last week.
Alan Alda is back on TV.
Seth McFarlane compares The Orville to M*A*S*H.
M*A*S*H really was ahead of its time.
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TRANSCRIPT: MASH Matters Episode #007 – Dan Wilcox!
Attention all personnel. Incoming podcast. This is MASH Matters.
RYAN: Greetings and salutations. Hello, how are ya? My name is Ryan Patrick and I am pleased to be joined once again by my partner, Mr. Jeff Maxwell. Hello, Jeff.
JEFF: Hello, Ryan Patrick and it is indeed Jeff Maxwell. And Ryan, I know that we are both very excited about our guest today and I know that everyone listening and everybody who listens to, well, basically any MASH-oriented program, but especially MASH Matters, will be thrilled because we have someone who is a tremendous member of the MASH family, an incredibly talented writer, producer, all-around nice guy, and I’m talking about Mr. Dan Wilcox.
DAN: The introduction scared me. I was waiting to hear someone else’s name announced.
ALL: [laugh]
DAN: I’m honored that you’ve asked me to do this.
JEFF: Well, thank you. That’s very nice. So Dan, before we start kind of getting into MASH, I’d like our listeners to know a little bit about your history and from what I understand, you began your writing career in a show, a children’s show, called Captain Kangaroo.
DAN: I did, yes. And it’s really where I learned the basics of writing.
JEFF: Wow.
DAN: You had to deliver something once a week.
JEFF: Aha.
DAN: Some weeks, two scripts. I spoke to the Writers Guild about this after I was no longer on Captain Kangaroo and they said, oh no, that’s completely improper. They interpreted their deal with the Writers Guild that they could ask the writers to write one or two scripts a week at their discretion. So you didn’t usually have to do it every week but like every other week, there’d be twice the assignment for the exact same money.
JEFF: Oh, that’s not good. You know, can you kind of describe that show for people who don’t know what the heck Captain Kangaroo is because it’s kind of a weird title?
DAN: Well, he wore, I don’t know where the Captain came from, he wore sort of a naval looking uniform. It had a lot of pockets from which in the early shows he would produce toys and play with them on camera. So that was the kangaroo reference that his pockets had stuff in.
JEFF: Oh, referring to the pouch.
DAN: The mini mini pouches.
JEFF: Mini mini pouches.
DAN: He also was – he was bald and he wore a wig and he was not as handsome as you think.
ALL: [laugh]
JEFF: You know, I do remember him. I do. When I was a kid, I did see it.
DAN: Were you in the audience when I was writing it?
ALL: [laugh]
DAN: 65, 66, 67?
JEFF: Sure. Why not? Absolutely. I had a good time. The whole family and I watched it.
DAN: It was embarrassing, but I’d meet an attractive woman at a party, and it would turn out that she had been in the audience when I was writing Kangaroo.
JEFF: Yeah, that’s not a hot title, is it, to say, “hi, baby, I’ve been writing Captain Kangaroo for three years. What do you want to do?” I don’t know, when I saw him, he bothered me a little bit. I was never a fan, because he just kind of, you know, he made me nervous. That guy in a thing named Captain Kangaroo. But I’m sure he was a very nice man. I know the show was on for a million years, and he did a lot of fine stuff. But gosh, he was kind of strange to me.
DAN: He was a difficult, very demanding boss, and loudmouthed and swore a lot.
JEFF: Really? Oh my. This is big.
DAN: He also–he had done something important. He had been–I don’t know if you know this about him. He was on the Howdy Doody show and he played Clarabel the Clown. It was a mute clown who had a bulb horn like Harpo Marx’s, that was how he’d communicate or get your attention with the bulb horn. Then he’d pantomime what he needed. And he would squirt people with seltzer–with a big seltzer bottle that he carried. So when, when Keeshan, Bob Keeshan was the guy’s name, he was Clarabel and later became Captain Kangaroo, when he had his first child, he thought, I don’t want my kid watching this short of show. And he created a show for children where the host was soft spoken, polite and courteous. And he did that beautifully. I mean, he carried that character off on camera beautifully. And he was about halfway to–wasn’t all the way to that. Fred Rogers went the rest of the way.
JEFF: Yeah.
DAN: But Keeshan really did something important, I think, for children’s television. I remember reading when I was there, they had the sheet of “thou shalt nots” that they sent to all the sponsors saying “we will not permit you to say this in a commercial on our show at Christmas time: “ask Mommy and Daddy to give you this for Christmas”. That was not permitted and I thought I was proud to be on a show that took that sort of a stand.
JEFF: Well, he presented a very nice image that children and obviously adults resonated with because the adults were turning the TV on and off. So everybody sort of, it was okay.
DAN: That’s one of the secrets. The reason Sesame Street is as adult as it is, and it’s pretty adult, given that it’s for three to five year olds, is that they started on the premise that the adults control the television. So it had to be alright with them to have that show on. Gonna turn it on for the kids and then have to watch that. You didn’t see a lot of adults watching Teletubbies.
RYAN: Well, not sober anyway, no.
ALL: [laugh]
RYAN: Now, now Sesame Street, you worked on Sesame Street too. And Jim Henson is, has always been a hero of mine. How was it working with Jim Henson?
DAN: We didn’t often get to work directly with Jim. The Muppets were actually in the studio. I mean, the Muppets that were in the studio every day were Oscar the Grouch, Big Bird, because the same puppeteer did both of them, Carol Spinney.
RYAN: Yeah.
DAN: And later the Snuffleupagus was added to that. Back then, only Big Bird ever saw the Snuffleupagus.
RYAN: Mm hmm, I remember that.
DAN: Couldn’t do a Snuffleupagus piece anywhere else but on the street. So, it hung from the ceiling. Look up and there was this huge creature over your head. Also, no one knew how big it was. Maybe you could tell how big it is now because everybody sees him and everybody can do a scene with him. But when I was there, since only Big Bird ever saw him and the end of the piece always was the Snuffleupagus would have to go home while Big Bird was getting his friend saying, “here, come look, he’s here now. I can prove he’s real” and by the time everybody arrived, the Snuffleupagus would be gone.
RYAN: Mm hmm
DAN: So, you never got to see the Snuffleupagus alongside a person.
JEFF: Ah, aha!
DAN: So the puppet of the bird which was like seven feet tall, it’s big. It’s like, yeah, okay, that’s large. That’s big, like maybe the size of a collie. But it was really huge.
JEFF: Is there a lot of pressure on the writers to make all this stuff work? Like, you’re talking about a show compared to a network show like MASH or something that has all this visibility to it. Was there that kind of pressure with those two shows?
DAN: With Sesame Street and Kangaroo?
JEFF: Uh huh
DAN: Not the same sort of pressure. You know, anytime you go into a situation where you know what you’re doing is good, and most of the people seem to know how to do it, there’s pressure on you to keep it up. That’s, and that’s what both of those shows felt like to me. I mean, with me on the Kangaroo staff was a guy named Clark Gesner who wrote the Charlie Brown musical. Jeff Moss, he’s credited with creating Cookie Monster. I think a lot of people feel this. So I’ll just say it out loud. I was always thinking, “maybe I’m a fraud and they haven’t figured it out yet”
RYAN: Imposter syndrome. Yes.
JEFF: Imposter–yeah, so many people say–so many people in show business say, “oh gosh, as soon as they know I’m a fraud, I’m done.
DAN: I had that feeling at Sesame Street. What we were doing was– those were the two highlights for me. Sesame Street and MASH are the two top.
RYAN: So how did you get from Sesame Street to MASH? What was that path like?
DAN: You know, I got, well, alright, let’s see if I can track it out quickly. I played out everything that I wanted to do or could do in New York, which is where Sesame Street and Captain Kangaroo shot. I knew I had to go to Los Angeles. Got a job on a children’s TV show that shot in Austin, Texas. And I did that for a year and then moved on to LA. When I hit LA, I got in touch with people that I knew from either Sesame Street or The Electric Company, which is the other show that the Children’s Television Workshop had on the air back then. And one of them was Thad Mumford. Thad was, you know, it’s appropriate to use the past tense on that now.
JEFF: You know, I was going to bring that up. I kind of wanted to say we certainly offer our condolences to you for losing a good friend, a writing partner, and most importantly, as I say, a good friend. He was certainly a friend to you and obviously a very important part of the MASH family. So it was a very sad thing. So our condolences to you for losing that friend.
DAN: Thank you. It’s… I don’t know. It’s… I’m still… Every now and then I have a baseball question and I realize I can’t call Thad and ask him.
JEFF: Yeah, very difficult.
DAN: But anyway, I got in touch with Thad. We had written something together in my previous trip to LA, an episode of That’s My Ma. And I guess I was in touch with him, but I was doing other things. I was working on a show called America Tonight, which was the second year of Fernwood Tonight, which was the second year for Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.
JEFF: Martin Mull, right? And, uh,
RYAN: Fred Willard.
JEFF: Doug Fred Willard, yeah.
DAN: So I got a call in the middle of that from Thad. He was about to be offered and he knew it. It was coming. An episode of the second round of Roots. Wow. So he had told them that he didn’t want to write it alone. He wanted to write it with me. I have no idea why me, except that we had written together before. But what we’d written together before was That’s My Mama.
JEFF: And hey, that Roots was a pretty funny show. So, hey, makes sense.
DAN: He had a way, Thad did, all his life of getting out of a difficult situation by lying.
ALL: [laugh]
DAN: He often didn’t realize he was doing it. He said to them, I want to write this with my friend Dan Wilcox because he’s had a lot of experience in long form. I think you can find the lie in that sentence. The longest thing I’d ever written was that That’s My Mama. So we talked it over with our agent and the agent said, don’t try to lie your way out of it. Don’t try to write something over the weekend and show it to them. Tell them Dan’s not available, but you still want to do it by yourself. If they give you the assignment, write it with Dan and you pay him under the table.
JEFF: Oh, boy. OK. Wow.
DAN: So he told them that I wasn’t available. They said, OK, will you do it? He said, yes. And then he and I wrote it and he gave me the money, half the money.
RYAN: Wow.
DAN: We went on living that lie. It kept growing, of course, because they didn’t know I was there.
JEFF: So the producers, nobody knew you were actually part of that script.
DAN: That’s right.
JEFF: Wow.
DAN: And Thad started saying, I got to tell them, I’m going to tell them. When we handed in the first 20 pages or so, he said, “I’m going to tell them”. Then he walked confidently out the door, came back in, “I hadn’t told them”. He’s thinking about it as he drove over. What if he didn’t like these pages? He didn’t want it to look like he was blaming me. So he’d wait if they liked it, then he’d tell them. Another excuse, then another excuse. It went on for months and I decided, okay, it’s not gonna happen. He’s never gonna tell them. And I’ll know that I did it and that may have to be enough. After–at the end of that, that said, you want to be partners on everything and I said, sure.
JEFF: Okay, interesting. So that’s how the partnership really got started.
DAN: That’s well, really started with That’s My Mama. But when we were on another show called The Waverly Wonders, Thad decided, it was now clear that they liked what we had done, and he decided he had to tell them. He went over to the Lorimar office and told them. They had already shot the titles. They had to go back and reshoot the card, so it added my name. And I said to people, it’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a human being do. Certainly it’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen a human being in show business.
JEFF: Yeah. Wow. That’s a great story.
RYAN: That is.
DAN: We, we did the way The Waverly Wonders together. We’re on a series called Angie together and we got fired off of Angie, which was all right, we weren’t happy there. It never feels good to be fired, but the MASH offer came along. Possibility. We wrote a script and on the strength of the script, we got the job. I’m surprised if you look at it, I moved to Los Angeles, and in about a year and a half, I was writing an episode of the second round of Roots. And six months later, I was a writer on MASH.
RYAN & JEFF: Wow.
DAN: I didn’t expect things to happen that fast.
JEFF: Was there a–was there a certain level of–I mean, you certainly had done a lot of shows and series, but was there a certain level of intimidation to walk into a show like MASH?
DAN: Oh, of course.
JEFF: Yeah?
DAN: I’ve told people for years, I felt as if I’d been handed a Faberge egg and told not to break it.
JEFF: Well, you certainly didn’t break it, buddy.
RYAN: Were you aware of the show? Were you a fan of the show before you started writing on it?
DAN: Yes, but not from the way you would expect. I was in Texas working on a children’s show when MASH went on the air and I didn’t have a lot of time to watch a lot of TV then. But when I went to LA, CBS, which didn’t realize what it had, Fox didn’t know what it had, they started showing repeats of MASH at 1130 at night. They had an advantage. You could show more commercials in a half hour at that hour. So a lot of shows got cut down to the–instead of, I think we did 24 minutes–24 and a half minutes of entertainment in the half hour. A lot of shows would cut that down to 22 minutes so they could put the extra commercials in. But MASH didn’t have to cut down because CBS didn’t have anything else to go on after. So they would go for 35 minutes and show the exit commercials. And that’s when I got to know how good the show was. Even then my experience of writing the show was I kind of learned it one character at a time. He started with Hawkeye and then what kind of jokes would he do and what kind–how did BJ talk. And then went through them focusing on the one at a time. The last one to fall into place for me was Charles Emerson Winchester, when I realized I agreed with him.
JEFF: So when you–what kind of a process did you go through in terms of becoming part of MASH? You turned in a sample script or a spec script?
DAN: No, it was the paid script. It was the one that eventually won the Writers Guild Award.
JEFF: Oh wow.
DAN: Are You Now, Margaret.
JEFF: Oh sure.
RYAN: Yes.
DAN: I watched it last night. I had it recorded because it was on recently and I hadn’t seen it in probably 30 years. You had a funny line in it, Jeff.
JEFF: Thank you.
DAN: It’s not going to sound funny if I say it here. It was “you want fries with that?”
JEFF: Hey, if I’m in a bar, you know, alone and it’s a good night, I say that all the time. I say, hey, “you want fries with that?”
DAN: We wrote the script on that premise. The story didn’t quite work when the show geared up really going in action, Gene Reynolds showed up. I hadn’t known how brilliant he was. He was astonishing. And he came up with the story turn that saved the script and we wrote it. And we possibly could have had an Emmy nomination for it. We didn’t get a Writer’s Guild nom–oh, we nominated something else, that’s why we didn’t get an Emmy nomination for it.
RYAN: When you say that it’s been 30 years since you watched that episode, but that episode is the episode that catapulted you into the MASH family, what’s it like 30 years later, sitting down and watching that show again, knowing that you created the words, you and Thad Mumford created the words that were coming out of those actors’ mouths?
DAN: It’s funny, to me, I was saying, well, that’s not as good as I thought it was, well, that’s good.
ALL: [laugh]
DAN: My wife had not seen it before and was sitting next to me and it blew her away. I mean, it is a very good episode.
RYAN: Yes.
DAN: I don’t necessarily take a lot of credit for that by myself. You guys know the process of writing a sitcom. There’s a rewrite room. We were in the rewrite room, so we were part of it. The group sits around the table, well I didn’t sit at the table, I was a smoker then. They didn’t want me.
ALL: [laugh]
DAN: I sat in a chair across the room. But the group sits around the table and changes every little thing that they find necessary to change. We were part of that. If somebody said that if they wanted to change something, even if it was a line I liked. I would help try to think of what the new line ought to be. So by the time it gets shot in that process, you don’t have quite the same proprietary feeling you would have if you’d written every word of it yourself. I don’t mean that that as a bad thing, but I was watching it thinking, oh, I remember John Rappaport pitched that line, or I remember when Thad came up with that joke. It was wonderful. He had a way of coming up with fully-formed jokes out of the blue. I quoted a couple of them at the memorial. What was the one that–oh, it just popped out of his mouth once, but that–somebody–we were meeting with the CBS brass, we had a luncheon. And at the end of it, somebody said something about something was going to happen in Rapid City, South Dakota. And Thad said, “ah, yes, the premature ejaculation capital of the world”
ALL: [laugh]
JEFF: You know, I find this fascinating in terms of the comedy brain. I’ve always been interested in what that’s all about and you certainly have it. You talk about Thad Mumford and all of the other talented writers who are writing comedy. What do you think that gene is? I mean, people have said, gee, can you learn it? Can you figure it out? Do you have to be born with it? Is it environmental? Is it structures of the brain? What do you think it is?
DAN: There are people who have it and people who don’t.
JEFF: Oh, okay.
DAN: People who have it exercise it effortlessly.
JEFF: Yeah.
DAN: Larry Gelbart.
JEFF: Oh.
DAN: Well, I mean, he really had it. He was Thad’s hero.
JEFF: He was amazing. What an amazing guy he was. Were you a–were you a funny kid? I mean, I know when I grew up. Oh, let’s talk about me now. OK. When I was growing up, I suddenly–and I was kind of an overweight kid. I wasn’t I wasn’t good at sports. Some overweight kids are great at sports. I wasn’t, I couldn’t do much of anything. But I was overweight. You know, kids would, you know, make fun of me and beat me up and nobody would talk to me. And so you either become a, you know, a terrorist [laughs] or you start finding ways to relate to the world. And usually, hopefully, it’s a positive thing like being funny or thinking you are funny and making your friends laugh. And then when you make your friends laugh, and you make your parents laugh and it goes on and on and on. But it came out of, you know, it came out of that difficult, painful process of being made fun of. And you hear so many comics talk about that. You’re not a comic. You didn’t have that sense of “I want to stand up at stage and do jokes” and stuff. But were you a funny kid? Did you have that gene in you or that need to kind of be silly and funny?
DAN: Sometimes. I wasn’t the class clown. I came from a family that was kind of very showbiz. My mother, her brother was a big deal producer/director on Broadway, Jed Harris. Actually, Jed helped me get my first job on Kangaroo. I had audition material that I was gonna carry up to the office and hand in. And I went to look at the show at my mother’s house and her brother Jed had out of the blue dropped in and stayed with her, he was sleeping on the sofa. So he could set up and watched an episode of Captain Kangaroo with me and then looked at what I’d written, critiqued it, gave me a crash course in comedy writing.
JEFF: Wow.
DAN: Stuff that I still work from today. It was brilliant. He was, he was the only real genius I’ve ever met. And, uh, I went–long story. I wasn’t staying at my mother’s house. My girlfriend had rented a place in New York for the summer and she and I were living there together. It didn’t have a TV, so I had to go to my mother’s house to watch Captain Kangaroo.
RYAN: Seems appropriate.
DAN: I went back to my typewriter in my girlfriend’s apartment and rewrote the scene according to what I just learned and I got the job in a flash.
JEFF: Oh, wow. But you never wanted to perform per se and get up and tell jokes–.
DAN: Through college I was an actor.
JEFF: Oh really, okay.
DAN: One of the three best actors at Cornell when I was there.
JEFF: Wow, all right. So you had that buzz in there.
DAN: But I left it. When I started writing, I never looked back.
JEFF: Even though you’re even though it’s still in a comedic vein, you felt much more comfortable in the writing process of comedy rather than performing it.
DAN: Yes.
RYAN: So the process of writing, I’m curious, when you and Thad would work on a script, how would that work? Would you two sit together and write together or would you come up with your own things and then come together and decide what to use? What was your process?
DAN: Well, we did sit together and work. We even took turns in who typed, because the person at the typewriter has a certain amount of command over what’s going to happen. So we took turns, but we would do it line by line, playing it out ourselves. Like there are teams that actually split up and one team will do act one, the other team will do act two. The other person in the team will do act two. I wouldn’t have felt right doing that. It wouldn’t have felt like it wouldn’t have felt organic. It’s funny because that’s only the beginning of the process. The rest of the process is, on MASH we did three passes through a script in the rewrite room and then we took it to a dinner at Burt Metcalf’s house, I think it was on Wednesday nights, and Gene Reynolds would come and we’d get his notes and changes on the same script. And then we’d set it up for the first readthrough with the cast and they would have notes. When we finished the script, we’d take a five which always lasted 15. And then come back and get notes from the cast. Anybody who had a note anyplace, we would entertain it. There was a lot of respect back and forth on that show. I remember getting a phone call, on the stage they wanted to change a line. They wanted to put in a new line. Would we please come take a look at it? I can tell you, on most shows I’ve been on, they wouldn’t have bothered to do that.
JEFF: And MASH was a special group of people. You mentioned Gene Reynolds coming over to dinner. Now, Gene was the producer of the show, executive producer for I think the first four or five or maybe six years. He was no longer the executive producer, however, when you were on the show. Is that right? Am I remembering?
DAN: He was a consultant. He’d left the show. We only saw him one day a week.
JEFF: Okay, so his role then as a consultant was to come over and give you his notes on the script.
DAN: Right
JEFF: Okay.
DAN: Since you want to talk about Gene, I love–I loved working with Gene.
JEFF: Yeah.
DAN: We had a script, you may remember it, it was actually two half hours long. We didn’t show them together, but when the USO troop came to visit, Gwen Verdon was one of the stars.
JEFF: Yeah
DAN: There was a woman who had been with the USO troop in Vietnam who gave Burt the story. She had actually gotten, somehow, broken her ankle and they took her to a MASH unit. She had an affair with a doctor. And a bunch of stories came out of that, which they’re all partial. But we knew we had enough material to make a whole hour of television. But it was pieces of stories. There was a Gypsy Rose Lee story, which we set on Gwen Verdon, where she went to a unit in… Actually, it was in Vietnam. She went to a unit in Vietnam and said, “yes, yes, it’s really me. You’re not imagining things” and they had no idea who she was. But we hadn’t laid out the story. And Burt said, you know what? Tonight, this is on a Wednesday, tonight, let’s make Gene earn his money. And when we were finished with the readthrough and getting notes, Burt said, okay, Gene, we have all these pieces of story. We don’t have the full story, the order in which they’re going to happen and how they fit together. And Gene said, okay. So we told him all the pieces of the story and he was making notes on all of them on a yellow pad. When it was all done, Burt leaned back in his chair and Gene went into overdrive. He said, “well, you want a good picture for your opening. So… Here, Hawkeye is getting dressed up to go out in the morning. But he’s unusually dressy. Something’s different. And then we want to go from that for contrast, oh, well, you got this Klinger story”. And he went to the next item. Burt was making–writing all this down on a pad. In about 20 minutes, Gene had laid out an hour of television.
JEFF: Oh, gosh. Amazing.
DAN: It was breathtaking.
JEFF: Yeah.
DAN: I realized what a benefit the show had gotten from having him attached to it.
JEFF: I used to watch him, you know, I was sort of an observer of everything and I used to watch him work with everybody. And I was blown away at his elegance and the way he was able to maneuver a large group of people, pretty hot, you know, stars and powerful people in one sense, but maneuver them with a great deal of humanity. And still, you know, everybody knew who the boss was. And it was an amazing thing to watch. I told him that when I saw him at Bill Christopher’s memorial. I said, “Gene, I was really amazed by you and how skilled you were at maneuvering this incredible group of people and keeping everybody happy”. And he said, “oh, yeah”.
ALL: [laugh]
JEFF: And then I left. But, you know, but I was–I mean, he was an incredibly skilled, talented man. He is. He still is.
DAN: Yeah.
JEFF: Great guy. And so you became an executive producer. Is that–
DAN: Not on MASH.
JEFF: Not on MASH. Oh, I thought you were–I thought you were–
DAN: That was Burt.
JEFF: Oh, that was Burt. Right.
DAN: We became producers.
JEFF: Producers. OK.
DAN: Of the people who got the title producer, Dennis Koenig also was elevated to producer, John was–probably became supervising producer. But I was the only one who actually went to do a couple of producer-y things.
JEFF: Speaking of that, producer-y things, a lot of people ask me about what various people do. You’ve got titles, executive producer, producer, co-producer, supervising producer, created by, showrunner, all these things that sort of show up. And it’s a little confusing if somebody wants to–is looking at that going, well, what do those people do? Why are all those people, you know, why are they eight producers and one executive producer and who’s doing what?
DAN: Well, the reason there are so many producers is the Producers Guild could not gain control over that title. The companies found–discovered and this was definitely true with me, that they could pay us with a title instead of money and the agents would be happy. And there’s another piece to that, which is you get a pension, you get contributions made to your pension based on your income from writing. This is the Writers Guild deal. If part of your work was producing, money received for producing does not count towards your Writers Guild pension. So they can save money on our pensions by paying us the exact same amount of money and calling us producers.
RYAN: Oh wow. Okay.
DAN: Anyway, a lot of that is–also the producer title got adulterated so much because people could just take it. I mean, one of the reasons the Writers Guild formed in the first place was that people were assigning themselves “written by” credit when they had done nothing. It was a struggle for the writers to get control over who could get credit for having written something. And one of the big things the Writers Guild does now is it determines who gets the credit.
RYAN: Speaking of titles and written by credits, I’m looking at the 17 episodes that you had a hand in creating for MASH. And most of them say written by Dan Wilcox and Thad Mumford, but there’s one that says “story by” and there’s one that says “teleplay by”. And I’ve seen that on other episodes too, crediting other writers, what’s the difference between “written by”, “story by” and “teleplay by”?
DAN: Well, “written by” would mean you wrote everything, the story, the scripts. It’s–to some extent, it’s a work of fiction when you think of how much of the work is done in the rewrite room, but that’s what that title means. Teleplay would mean you wrote the script but not the story. “Story by” means you did the story and someone else did the script. You may have contributed to the story. We laid out the story–no matter who wrote it, we laid it out in the rewrite room with index cards up on the bulletin board. What are the examples of “story by” in my case? Would you have–
RYAN: IMDB credited you “story by” for Death Takes a Holiday.
DAN: Okay. Death Takes a Holiday was a Mike Farrell script. And he didn’t realize, I think, how normal it was to have a large rewrite done. We did the large rewrite and he insisted on having us take part in the credit.
RYAN: Okay.
DAN: And I guess they had to find a way to divvy it up. I keep referring to the Writers Guild, I’m on the committee at the Writers Guild, the Waiver Committee, where people want exceptions to the rules of–for instance, if they wanted to be credited for something, the Waiver Committee has to approve it. Because there are rules, we won’t normally give credit for a script to more than three people. And if it’s a team of five or seven that all wrote, they all feel they wrote it together, they need our permission. So I think that for that one, Mike insisted that we come in. And I think the reason I’m credited for story is that was the piece that Thad and I wound up with. That was the wedge of the pie that we got. But I think the entire staff is credited on that one. And Mike.
RYAN: Well, and that also brings up the final episode, Goodbye, Farewell and Amen, which had a tremendous roster of writers. How did that work with that many writers being involved with the finale? How did you all work together to craft that?
DAN: Well, I’ll tell you, what was interesting was the first half of it, just getting the basic script written. We laid out a story with Alan Alda with us, the same procedure we would have done anyway. And then divided that into, I forget how many writers there were separately, but my recollection is that it was seven people. Thad and I as a team would be one of seven entities. And each of those entities worked with Alan Alda.
RYAN: Wow.
DAN: I’m trying to–I don’t remember which, I would recognize it if I watched the last episode, but it was somewhere in the middle. There was a point where whoever had been going before stopped. And now it was our turn. And Thad and I went to Alan’s dressing room and wrote that section, our section with him. When we came to the end of what had been given to us, then the next, it was the next person’s turn in the gate, in the room. So that the first draft was written every word of it, Alan Alda was in there for it.
RYAN: Wow.
DAN: But we had all swapped in and out for different sections. Then the entire script was rewritten around the table and the customary three times through that, and then a time with Gene and we did all of that stuff. You know, we all knew that we would have stories. We were having trouble coming up with stories that the series hadn’t done before. But we knew if we could get to the end of the war, there would be new things that hadn’t been dealt with. I had talked to a Dr. Maurice Connolly. Oh, thank goodness I remembered his name when I needed to.
JEFF: He’s our guest next week, actually. It’s going to be good.
DAN: Oh, he died years ago.
JEFF: Oh. Ryan, did you know he’s dead? For God’s sakes, that’s not right.
RYAN: I guess he won’t be our guest next week then.
JEFF: Okay
DAN: He had been in a MASH unit in Korea and he was–his MASH unit was there and he was serving when the war ended. So he remembered, for instance, that everyone was surrendering to his unit. North Koreans were coming out of the woods with their hands up saying, feed me. There was food at the MASH unit and they didn’t have any. He remembered them getting a North Korean dance band, the musicians. They were in uniform, but they were musicians for the North Korean Army. And he said, we use them for entertainment. We had a couple of dances. You remember them playing “I Dream of Jeannie With the Light Brown Hair”. That became for the final episode, the story about the Korean musicians that get befriended by Charles Winchester. Yeah.
JEFF: Oh, yeah.
DAN: He tries to teach them the Mozart clarinet quintet and they get transferred away. And then the last triage that the unit does, because the fighting steps up. Once peace was reached, the fighting stepped up because within–I guess they reached the pact at the table and 12 hours later it was to go into effect. And if you could move the boundary lines in that 12 hours, that’s what the final lines would be. So fighting stepped up even though peace had been declared. And for that last triage, we brought back in one of the musicians wounded.
JEFF: Oh boy.
RYAN: Yeah. Powerful moment.
JEFF: Well, what was–how was magic different? If it was for you, then some of the other shows that you’ve been involved with.
DAN: Well, it’s going to sound like I’m changing the subject, but I’m not. I was unhappy at one point about what–with what I was being paid at Sesame Street. And I talked to a friend of mine who was a working comedy writer and said, I’m thinking of quitting. And he said, don’t quit. It worked on Caesar’s hour. Sid Caesar said once in my life, I was working on a show where all anybody wanted was for it to be good. You’ve got that now. Hang on to it. And the same was true of MASH. I got it again. I didn’t think I would. And I did. All anybody wanted was for it to be–good is an oversimplification. But to be fair and honest, funny, moving. It’s the only comedy I’ve ever worked on that I cried while I was writing a script.
RYAN: Really?
JEFF: I think that certainly that feeling is obviously something that when I talk to Ryan and I talk to other people who are fans of MASH, they get that and I think that’s, you know, we talk about MASH Matters and I wonder why MASH matters and part of the show is kind of examining that a little bit. Why does MASH matter? Does it? And what about it affects people? And does a show–can a television show really have an effect on us as a society or not? I don’t know that. I don’t know the answer to the question. But, you know, some people come home from work, they have a hard day at work, they want to, you know, they slug down some libation and they want to turn on a TV and laugh for a few minutes and laugh for a half an hour and if a show does that, they feel good. But after those laughs I wonder if they really go away with some lesson learned or any–anything. I don’t know. But, MASH is–everywhere I go and I have said I’m associated with the show, everybody really immediately goes, “oh my God, MASH”. And it’s a heart thing. They grab their heart. And so something was really going on there.
DAN: I don’t really know what it is. I just–there was certain ambiguity in the very premise that made it always interesting. People wrestling with themselves. If you think about it, all of our villains in the episodes when I was there were on our side in the war.
JEFF: Mm hmm.
DAN: This show was against war. And I think we’ve all been stuck doing something one time or another where we didn’t agree with what was being done or why it was being done, but we had to do the job. And I think we got something out of that. It never put it into words. Ambivalence.
JEFF: Yeah
DAN: But it was part of what we were writing. They hated what they were doing, and that’s why they made jokes all the time. The jokes worked, worked for them and worked for the audience. I’m not going to pretend that I know what the secret was. If I knew what the secret was, I would have sold it as a pilot.
ALL: [laugh]
DAN: And we’d be talking about that show.
JEFF: Well, it is, I mean, you know, obviously you’ve certainly had people say that to you and they get tears in their eyes and they talk about their family. Or I used to, you know, Ryan has told me he used to watch it with his mom?
RYAN: Yes, yeah, my mom.
JEFF: And a lot of people tell me that they grew up watching it with their parent. And I had one conversation with Alan Alda once about this, and he said, well, I think a lot of it is the fact that it may or may not be the actual show that’s having the impact, but there is a bond between the parent and the child at that moment. So the feeling that they walk away with is really the bond and not necessarily about the show. It might have been, you know, another show, but–and that bond would still have been there and they would have felt emotionally connected to that show as well. I don’t know. You know, MASH was a very special magical thing that happened.
DAN: I wouldn’t negate that bond. I don’t think–I don’t think that’s wrong, but I don’t think that’s all there is to it. The show was intensely human.
JEFF: Yeah.
DAN: I’ll tell you what I–watching the Are You Now Margaret episode, I had forgotten how good Loretta was in it. I knew she was good and she won an Emmy for it. But I was impressed now in a way that I wasn’t back then. Maybe because I know her, because I know what else she did on the show, what other kinds of things. This was virtuosic.
JEFF: Are there any secrets you can tell us that we don’t know about MASH?
DAN: Did you bury the time capsule?
JEFF: [laughs] I was, you know, certainly for me, I showed up on MASH because I’d spent a bunch of years in nightclubs as the wacky half of a comedy team. And when I showed up on MASH, I thought, wow, a TV show. Everybody’s going to, you know, get naked and have a lot of sex, and there’s going to be a lot of drugs and rock and roll. Wow, this is really great. In reality, turned out to be a bunch of adults. And I was very disappointed.
ALL: [laugh]
JEFF: What are these people doing? Wait a minute, these are grownups. And I have to admit, as a young fellow, I grew up there. And I was connected with the show for nine years. And I learned from–I was very fortunate and I’m very grateful to have been around the caliber of talent that I was. It was kind of an accident that I was there. But boy, I loved it and it gave me a great deal. And I’m grateful for that experience as–and I’m grateful for the experience you gave me. And just being around you and the kind of people who were putting that show together was a very special moment for me. As well as it is for everybody, which I think is why we’re also kind of connected on some DNA-ish level. I’m starting to tear up, but I’ll be okay.
RYAN: Uh oh, we’re getting sentimental now.
ALL: [laugh]
DAN: I have a friend in England who’s a comedy writer, Peter Spence. He created the show To The Manor Born. We met because someone told him that I was in town in London and he wanted to meet anyone who had worked on MASH. I went with him–we’ve become very good friends. I went with him on a trip. We dropped in on a couple of friends of his who were comedy writers. And he hadn’t briefed them. He said to one that Dan worked on MASH and the guy said, MASH? I am not worthy. I am not worthy.
JEFF: Oh my goodness. I’ll tell you, one scary story for me is I went to a school to talk about show business. They had a school–kids that are in drama classes and stuff. And there was a bunch of people from the music industry and dancers and people from TV and movies and stuff. So we were all there to kind of talk about our experiences to the kids, the high school kids. And it came to me and I got up and I said something about well, how many have you how many of you have seen MASH? Not one hand went up. This was 60 kids in a high school. And I thought–I kind of–really I thought it was a joke I thought somebody was playing a joke on me. I said well, okay, how many, how many of you see MASH? “No, I think maybe I saw it”. They had not seen the show and I said well, what am I here for? What–what are we doing here? And so I kind of talked, we chatted a bit, but wow, that was kind of a shock. That had never hit me before. I’d never experienced that.
DAN: Same experience with a group of film school students. They had never seen MASH.
JEFF: Never seen MASH. Then I asked them if they know who Jerry Lewis was, and they did not.
RYAN: So you were talking to a bunch of idiots then.
JEFF: I think so, yes. Oh, maybe this was the idiot high school I went to. I don’t know. I never went back though.
RYAN: They’re still there. They haven’t graduated yet.
JEFF: No, they don’t–yeah, that was 30 years ago. They’re still in high school. Hey, Dan Wilcox, I can’t thank you enough. I know I dogged you and said, oh, please come on. Please, please, please. And I hope I wasn’t too pushy about it. But I know Ryan and I were very excited about it. And we talked about you and we’re very thrilled and appreciative of you spending some time with us. Ryan, do you have anymore–you want to delve into perhaps his bank routing number or anything? While we got him.
RYAN: [laughs] We’ll do that off the air. I just want to say as a fan, Dan, that your words have brought me and many others much joy throughout the years. I want to tell you too, Dan, because it’s rare that I would get an opportunity to tell the writer of the show, one of my all-time favorite episodes is a show that you and Thad wrote, which is A War for All Seasons. And so I just want to thank you for writing that particular episode. I’ve watched that episode probably more than any other episode, and it brings me a lot of joy. So thank you for that.
DAN: Oh, thank you. That’s one of my favorites also, and it was my idea to make a year go by in one episode.
RYAN: Oh, wow.
DAN: Which let us do stories we’d wanted to do something about, again, Maurice Connolly’s unit had improvised the dialysis machine and they got their parts by ordering from Sears Roebuck, which could deliver all the way to the Korean War.
RYAN: Great.
DAN: So we had stories like that where how could you send in a request to Sears Roebuck and the month later the goods arrive, you couldn’t tell that normally–the understanding on a sitcom is about two weeks at most will go by. So for this, with a whole year, it let us tell stories, that was one that needed the time. Father Mulcahy planted a garden, he planted corn and it grew, and Jeff ruined it.
JEFF: I ruined that corn
ALL: [laugh]
DAN: And followed the story of the Brooklyn Dodgers, which–their fall from grace in 1951. And he had to go the whole summer to follow that story, to tell that story. So it opened up stories that we couldn’t do any other way.
JEFF: You know, some people like creamed corn. I mean, I don’t know.
ALL: [laugh]
RYAN: Let it go, Jeff. Let it go.
JEFF: All right. Gee whiz. Well, hey, we could probably talk to you for another two hours, but you probably would get mad. So, again, we thank you and appreciate this very, very much. And don’t be a stranger. If you ever want to come back and talk about anything, please do. Our MASH Matters is yours.
RYAN: Thank you, Dan. Thank you so much.
DAN: As you can see, I can go on and on. But if you want to talk to some other people, I’m sure, but if you ever want me back, I’ll be happy to.
RYAN: Yeah.
JEFF: Abso-positively-lutely. Very, very much. We thank you for all your pearls of wisdom and all the insights that you’ve shared with us about your life and of course, everybody’s favorite show, MASH. So we thank you. And now you can go eat dinner. Thank you.
DAN: Thank you guys
