Script To Screen: “M*A*S*H”
From the 1970 movie M*A*S*H, screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on a novel by Richard Hooker.
From the 1970 movie M*A*S*H, screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., based on a novel by Richard Hooker.
Before the long-running television series of the same name, there was the movie. Featuring members of a MASH unit during the Korean War, the movie was a controversial one — befitting a Robert Altman film — and 20th Century Fox came this close to never releasing it. They did, the movie was a hit, its screenplay won an Oscar, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Scene Setup: Having suffered from erectile dysfunction, Painless is convinced he should end his life. His fellow soldiers gather to celebrate his last supper.
Here is the scene from the movie:
I’ll see you in comments for a discussion of this scene from M*A*S*H.
One of the single best things you can do to learn the craft of screenwriting is to read the script while watching the movie. After all a screenplay is a blueprint to make a movie and it’s that magic of what happens between printed page and final print that can inform how you approach writing scenes. That is the purpose of Script to Screen, a Go Into The Story series where we analyze a memorable movie scene and the script pages that inspired it.
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