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space-blue · 9 months

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Not that many care about my opinion on the topic, but I cannot comprehend the takes I've seen on Oppenheimer prior to viewing the film.

I'm just out of the cinema and I cannooooot believe that I've heard and seen people complain about the "Americans clapping" scene as not sensitive, and that it should have shown the bombs dropped and the damage done. I've read takes that came down to 'the film is PRAISING the bomb by refusing to show its damage' and holy shit I was bracing myself.

But not only is the clapping scene shot like the genre just switched to horror, plunging us into very interesting exploration of the mental dissonance Oppenheimer is going through at that moment... I was left wondering...

Have those critics not seen Grave of the Fireflies? Barefoot Gen? In This Corner of the World? Watched documentaries on the bombs, on hibakushas? Have they not read the Hiroshima book by John Hersey that collects horrifying first hand accounts of Hiroshima survivors?

Have they stepped into the theatre with no background understanding of the atomic bomb and the horrors it carried?

Because this entire scene, actually much of Oppenheimer's mindset post bomb drop, DEPENDS on the public's understanding of WHAT THE PEOPLE ARE CLAPPING FOR. They're clapping for their project completion, for their victory, and for unknown amount of dead people. And WE KNOW that they are clapping for some of the most horrifying shit ever. We know they're clapping the cold war and nuclear proliferation's birth.

The film relies on you understanding this! The film depends on you activating your neurons and putting 2 and 2 together.

The film treats the audience as adults who don't need to see dead civilians to EMPATHISE for those civilians. You're also meant to be alienated from these cheering scientists, just as you can't help understanding why they're cheering.

It makes sense yet it's awful. Dissonance.

If you need your hand held so bad to understand why the bomb is a great evil, no matter how necessary it might have felt, when watching a biopic, then maybe you should have stuck to Barbie only, as that film was fun but significantly less challenging.

Also damn but Gary Oldman as Truman was so terrific, this guy really is a million faces.

#oppenheimer #snips talks

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7grandmel · 3 months

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Todays rip: 10/01/2024

Kill & Learn (Recut Ver.)

Season 4 Episode 1 Featured on: SiIvaGunner's Highest Quality Rips: Volume L [Side B] Also on: STUDIO TRIGGER QUALITY MUSIC WORKS

Ripped by Smoky

youtube

High Quality Never Dies.

The end of Season 3 was quite a tumultuous time for SiIva. Being a music channel on YouTube, the SiIvaGunner channel always teeters over the gaping maw of copyright strikes from music production companies, made worse by YouTube's lack of protection from these false strikes. All of SiIvaGunner's content obviously falls under the umbrella of fair use by the nature of the channel: its core goal and aim is to REMIX music, not reupload it. Yet, in December 2018, eight videos were targeted by Sony Music Entertainment of Japan, which eventually spiralled into the channel's deletion at the beginning of 2019. Five years and one day ago, on January 9th, SiIvaGunner celebrated its third anniversary - with its main channel dead in the water due to YouTube's incompetency.

It's a damn shame that shit like this can happen to just about any aspiring creator on YouTube, and the team was immensely fortunate to have an audience large enough to catch YouTube's attention this time. By February of that same year, the channel was back, Season 3 was over, and Season 4 Episode 1 was officially online. And those copystruck rips were not going to be forgotten.

Kill & Learn (Recut Ver.) is not the same rip as the one that was initially part of that eight-video striking spree from 2018. Yet its an absolutely terrific remastering effort, uploaded during the long-awaited STUDIO TRIGGER event later in the Season. Much like the Planet Wisp Mashup Medley, its a direct tribute to the legendary ripper Triple-Q and one of his many in-jokes, of drawing comparison between the stories of Sonic Adventure 2 and STUDIO TRIGGER's Kill La Kill. Kill & Learn (Recut Ver.) is technically the third spin on this idea, with Triple-Q's own mashup Kill la Kill OST: Final Boss Theme first, followed by the original Kill & Learn (Uncut Ver.), and finally with Kill & Learn (Recut Ver.). All three follow the same premise, mashing up Kill La Kill's second OP Ambiguous with the main theme of Sonic Adventure 2, Live & Learn, yet all feel very different from one another. Live & Learn (Recut Ver.) is, to me, the ultimate endpoint of this concept, and the best of the three - it screams hype from every point of the song, with Live & Learn's vocals fitting the instrumental of Ambiguous like a glove - it's a mashup that felt destined to happen, and is here executed with five years worth of refining.

It warms my heart to see Kill & Learn (Recut Ver.) sitting at such a high view count (over 700K views as of writing) despite the troubled circumstances of its production, of how the original Kill & Learn (Uncut Ver.) is likely never going to be back up on YouTube. Yet, through the hype of the STUDIO TRIGGER takeover and sheer love of the original rip, we found a way to push this rip far past the original's view count. No matter what, high quality finds a way to live on!

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ckret2 · 4 months

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Did bill decide immediately on a top hat and bowtie, or did he go through a selection of other styles?

I headcanon that Bill doesn't wear a top hat and bow tie.

In the second dimension, having an eye in the middle of the body would be useless because you wouldn't be able to see through your body to view the outside world. He must have originally had his eye on a corner of his body.

That doesn't look like wearing a hat. That looks like peering through a telescope.

Bill's got an entire reputation built up around being the All-Seeing Eye. But there's canon evidence that his vision might not be terrific. (The way he squints to read the safe code to Gideon, and the fact that he didn't recognize the Stan & Ford swap—although I consider the second one weak evidence, neither Dipper & Mabel nor most of the audience noticed either.)

Makes sense for the all-seeing eye to carry around a tool to help him see better and farther. For people who recognize what it is (the few survivors from his dimension, mainly), permanently incorporating a telescope into his anatomy adds to his "I see everything" symbolism.

Since he no longer has a corner eye, if he wants to actually use the telescope, he just, pulls it down in front of his eye and peers into it.

And I've said that I think his bow tie is to keep his exoskeleton on.

(There should be internal organs in there but I didn't wanna draw them.)

He started accessorizing with a telescope when he realized that out in the third dimension it would be helpful to carry one at all times, since he used it a lot. And he added the straps when he started wearing an exoskeleton. Since both of these aren't fashion accessories, but functional tools he needs for practical reasons, he's never experimented with different fashions.

(I mean, maybe he's tried out a red telescope or maybe he's tried switching the tie-on straps for Velcro straps—but he's always had a telescope and something to tie on his exoskeleton; not, say, a fedora and a wristwatch.)

We know from the show's historical art of Bill that he'd been wearing his top hat and bow tie for millennia (at minimum) before those accessories existed, so he certainly didn't put them on for our benefit. But I think he leans into the fact that humans perceive them that way. It's a lucky/cute coincidence. If a human references his top hat & bow tie, he won't correct them and will use the same terms.

Occasionally during Weirdmageddon we see pictures of him without his usual "hat"; I think that's equivalent to taking off your glasses to more accurately cosplay a character. He's just in costume.

#redactedtimes #ask #headcanons #bill cipher

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invisibleicewands · 2 months

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WORTH A LOOK?: *****

WHEN?: Saturday 24 February, opens 6 March and runs through 11 May 2024 RUNTIME: 160 minutes (including a 20-minute interval)

A grieving son wraps his dying miner father in his arms, apologises for everything he could have done better to look after him and vows to make good by helping others.

The son is Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, the Labour politician and founder of the National Health Service on 5 July 1945, and Nye is the warts-and-all story of the man who would improve the health of countless millions of us and how he did it.

Nye died almost 15 years to the day he founded the NHS from stomach cancer and the conceit here is that he’s in hospital at the end of his life having a fever dream and wanders, pink pyjama-clad, through moments of importance.

Reading the article by former Labour leader Neil Kinnock in the programme about Bevan we discover his education was cut short at 13 when he followed his miner father down the pits to work in 1910.

In an almost reverse of film Dead Poets Society we meet the bullying schoolteacher who would cane a young Nye because of his speech impediment, the classmates who would protect him and the very Manic Street Preachers-like realisation that free libraries could give him the power to overcome his stammer by finding alternative words to those he could not utter.

Riffing on Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective Sheen’s Nye even sings Judy Garland’s Get Happy at 1 point as he and his miner colleagues use the time unemployment has afforded them to bone up on the way their home town of Tredegar in Wales is run and get themselves elected onto the boards of the bodies involved to finally do good by its people.

From our 4th row seats we see director Rufus Norris, also outgoing artistic director and chief executive of the National Theatre, tread the boards at the beginning of this 1st preview to remind us as such there might have to be a pause in proceedings because of the freshness of the material but perhaps 1 of the reasons its star Sheen is beaming so much during the curtain call (see picture below) is because it all actually went so well.

The action is staged as if in a hospital ward for much of the time with beds on wheels used to great effect and curtains around beds featuring prominently and at 1 point, rather brilliantly, lowering to become rows of seats in Parliament.

Tony Jayawardena (Marjorie Prime, Menier) is quite brilliant as Nye’s nemesis Winston Churchill, a man who succeeds in doing what Labour were unable to by uniting all classes in opposition to world war.

Sharon Small (Good, Harold Pinter Theatre) is more than a match for a revelatory performance by Sheen, at 1 point seemingly channelling the boyish enthusiasm of a young Declan Donnelly from Ant and Dec, as she explains the sacrifices she made to support her husband.

There’s a lot of injustice to make the audience angry here and there’s some terrific political theatre in London at the moment to both challenge the mind and make the heart soar – An Enemy Of The People and Standing At The Sky’s Edge for example.

Like the outstanding Dear England, this is an example of a venue at the top of its game doing exactly what it should be doing in offering insight into stories of those who have shaped our country and influenced the people we have become.

---------

Another one who sang "Get Happy":

youtube

#Michael Sheen #theatre #National Theatre #Nye #Aneurin Bevan #review #Youtube

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n0tangeliccc · 1 year

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Omg Jimmy smut

Bro I’m so dumb I just realized his name is James

How did I not know that 😭😭🥹😂😂

Opening night

Jimmy x Fem!Reader

(All characters are 18+)

Warning: smut, semi-public sex, unprotected sex, exhibitionism (kinda), and humiliation kinks (I’m bad at tagging help)

A/N: Wrote this based on some hcs I wrote here! (Also this is so late omg Im so sorry😭)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ✧˖°.

After weeks of waiting it was finally opening night for Jimmy’s show. This was probably his biggest show to date and he was extremely excited. You had snuck your way backstage to see your lovely boyfriend before his show started to congratulate him, he’d worked so hard for this and you were so proud.

You knocked on the door of his dressing room before walking in, “Hey there Mr. Jokester” you smiled. He quickly turned to you as you walked over “Y/N! W-w-what’s up p-pretty girl” he grinned and pulled you close to him. “Oh nothing just here to see the best comedian ever” you gave his forehead a quick kiss “How are you feeling baby? There’s a big crowd out there” He laughed “Oh I k-k-know, more than 600 p-p-people out t-there doll” you gave his shoulders a reassuring squeeze “Honestly I f-f-feel like I need a l-l-little ego b-b-booster” he looked up at you with a smirk “You’re on in like 10 minutes Jimmy! Can’t you wait until after the show? Maybe a little celebration” he chuckled as he saw your face flush “C-c-come on Y/N this is like our l-l-little tradition we do t-t-this every s-show” “Yeah but…you know how loud I can be and I don’t want all those people to hear” you whispered.Anyone who had gone to any of Jimmy’s shows at South Park knew of this “tradition”, it was no secret how loud you got during sex and as hard as you tried you just couldn’t help it! “C-come on baby! T-t-that’s the f-f-fun part!”

You two had gotten caught a handful of times and as embarrassing as it was you two kept doing it. The thrill of it just turned both of you on even more, so of course you gave in to it.

That’s how you ended up on top of Jimmy with him holding onto your hips, guiding you as you rode him. One of your hands on your mouth trying to contain your moans (and failing miserably) as the other held onto his shoulder for balance. “Wow s-s-so loud, a-almost l-l-like you want to be c-c-caught” Jimmy chuckled as he watched you struggling to hold back your moans “M-maybe you should j-j-just let go d-doll” he smirked before dragging one of his hands to your bud of nerves. “Fuck!” You threw your head back in pleasure as his thumb circled your clit “T-t-there good j-j-job pretty g-girl” He had you exactly how he loved, a loud moaning mess on top of him, his ego had definitely been boosted. A knock on the door made you stop and cover your mouth once again “4 minutes Mr. Valmer” called out one of the workers. You shoot him a panicked look but Jimmy just laughed “A-a-alright I’m a-almost done” He yelled back, “We b-b-better wrap t-t-this up baby” he whispered to you before he bucked his hips up roughly into you. You groaned loudly as you moved your hips to match his movements “I’m close” “M-me too d-doll” he grunted as you both speed up your movements desperate for your release. Your nails dug into Jimmy’s shoulders as with one last moan you came, your walls tightening around his cock. “F-f-fuck Y/N” his thrust became sloppy as he held you down on him before he also came inside you.

Another set of knocks hit the door as you changed back into your clothes and helped Jimmy fix himself up “Your on in 1 minute Mr. Valmer” You smiled and placed a kiss on Jimmy’s lips “Good luck hun” “Oh I d-d-don’t need any after t-t-that” he grinned as he walked out.

You left to sit with the crowd and cheered with them as he walked into the stage. “Wow, w-w-what a terrific audience"

“N-now this f-f-for this first j-j-joke you might have h-heard me and my g-girlfriend backstage…”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ✧˖°.

@emyasorensen hope you like it bby🧡

#south park x reader #south park fanfiction #south park x y/n #south park x you #south park smut #jimmy valmer x reader #jimmy valmer x you #jimmy valmer x y/n

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vidavalor · 5 months

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Hello! I trully love your metas ♥️

And I want to believe… but how do you match the fact that they have kissed (even fucked) for so many time with the only kiss we have seen which is so clumsly, so fist-time-type, and so turbovirgin?

Thank you!

Hi @margotmignard-blog Thank you and nice to meet you. :) Ok, this is for you and the few Anons who have sent me more or less the same Ask in the last 2 weeks or so as some of my posts have circulated a bit more so yeah, alright, I'll take it on. All of you please help yourself to hot chocolate and holiday M&Ms, even if you are making me think about Every again to write this lol.

Why do I think Crowley & Aziraphale are long-time lovers when Every is an awkward kiss? Because you know what looks just like clumsy, first-time kisses?

Old-married argument kisses of desperation when all other communication is failing that then wind up failing, too, that's what.

Two people kissing in distress is clumsy and messy no matter what stage of their relationship they're in and if they're upset and think the other is about to walk out the door and conflicted about opening up to the kiss because of the argument then all of that makes for a truly gut-wrenchingly awkward kiss. It didn't read as a first time kiss to me at all but I can understand how it might to someone.

I actually think that's the insanely evil genius of it lol. This show is such a bastard worth knowing, I tell ya. :) Right now, they have everyone being all "they need to have a better second kiss!" and just well... if you were them, wouldn't you want that? Would seem a good way to bury the surprise of an older kiss, wouldn't it? Would be a good way to sleight of hand some doubt into *checks notes* apparently everybody but me and a handful of others lol and so help to have everyone flailing again but for a better reason when they throw in an older, better kiss.

It's also a bolder move, both story-wise and performance-wise. Sadly, it's still a big deal that they've even kissed at all and it shouldn't be but, thankfully, it's becoming more common. In a way, though, that makes the fact that they made the first kiss you saw less than ideal a better choice and a better story.

Some more thoughts on this under the cut below that is beneath some gifs of these two who haven't apparently ever kissed before moments away from sex in the wall slam scene in S1... which is Every's parallel scene. By design. To illustrate a contrast. The first kiss we saw is a mirror of oh, just the start of some casual public sex that got interrupted by SatanicNun!Nina. Haven't we all had that relationship where we let someone throw us against a wall before we ever kissed? I mean...

Look at Aziraphale and his little 'getting up to some sexy trouble' smile here... does he not look like he knows *exactly* what he's asking for here and does Crowley not know what the request is and give it to him in a way that screams that this is not the first time? The tone here is a bit... You know, Crowley, I've always said I wanted to fuck in an empty broom closet in a former satanic nunnery and luck of the devil, you just kicked in a door and found one so you are sooooo nice throw me against the wall baby let's go... oh terrific of course this is exactly when the damn nun shows up oh well at least I can enjoy you slurring your S's in sexual frustration for now...

Good Omens throws something down and then gives you context for it later on that causes you to revisit what you thought when you initially watched it, right? They do this all the time. The scenes themselves always work fine on first viewing but they change and morph into a different scene when viewed with the added context the show gives you later. If you're writing a show in that way, you absolutely would make Every the first kiss you showed the audience... *especially* if it was in a cliffhanger-y season finale. Your Ask is exactly the reason why. You and I and a bonkers number of others are engaging with one another on the topic and we're engaging with the show as a result. Some of us are apparently willing to fight to the death insisting that Every is their first kiss. Some of us are like how you appear to be from your Ask, where you're willing to keep an open mind but you're leaning towards it was the first kiss. Some of us are like me and are feeling that, when all is said and done, they are building a relationship that is millennia old and that the show will wind up illustrating an entire history of it by its end and the idea that we have scenes out there already like Rome and The Globe Theatre and 1941 and Tadfield Manor but people think that they just kissed for the first time in 2023 is kind of head-scratching to me.

I've had people ask me how an ancient times vavoom would advance the story and I've answered in other meta how I think it would but I have an ask back for you all: how, honestly, would 2.06 being their first kiss advance the story? They've written characters who have had a relationship of some form with one another since before the Garden of Eden and have shown us that story throughout different points in time. S3 is going to be, at best, set a couple of years out from S2 and is probably set a lot sooner than that, so we're going to end their story sometime before 2026 on their timeline, probably... and the first kiss was in 2023? When you have the opportunity to write an entire millennia-old romantic relationship with all of its highs and lows and show it in the flashbacks and how they inform the relationship in the present? Because that story is already there. That's the story I see watching this and have since the first time I watched it. I'm frankly kinda floored by the number of people who insist that it's their first kiss, especially two seasons into the show. The same show that gave you this before it gave you The Blitz, Part 2?

I got accidentally spoiled for Every like a lot of people and when I saw Crowley's glasses on, I had the feeling that it was probably going to be a terrible kiss. I was hoping that it wasn't the only kiss in the season but when 2.05 finished without it showing up yet, it became obvious that it was going to be a big thing in the finale (hahaha oh God, remember when we didn't know? simpler times lol) and that meant that it was likely the only kiss in the season and while it ripped my heart out like it did everyone else, I never saw it as a first kiss for a second.

If you've been with somebody for a long time and, like everyone else, you have your disagreements and your things to work through but you tend to be the kind of couple where you can always or almost always rely on a baseline of physical communication that helps you express what you feel for one another-- which is a wordy way of saying 'when you've been with someone forever and the sex is amazing' lol-- maybe the worst thing that can happen between you is if that feels like it's falling apart, too. That's what I see in that kiss and, in particular, Aziraphale's reaction to it.

It's not 'turbo-virgin', in an unfamiliar with kissing way, imo-- it's a situation causing conflict for Aziraphale over whether or not he wants to give into the kiss. We've all seen it from every damn angle by now lol. We see him unable to not give in, just a little. He kisses Crowley back a bit. He touches his shoulder and his side. He doesn't pull away because he just can't, really, because he never really wants to not be kissing Crowley, but he also can't just give in because that's the situation that Crowley's set up by kissing him the way he did. Crowley wants him to run away with him and that's not a solution to any of this, either, and everything is a total mess and if Aziraphale just gives in and opens up more and really kisses Crowley, he's saying yes to just running off with him and they can't. There's really nowhere to go.

Even with all of that, he still can't resist kissing Crowley a bit and touching him because Crowley and because what he really wants is for them to be literally anywhere else, somewhere safe away from all of it, without having to worry about Heaven & Hell, but they aren't and he can't pretend that they are. That'd be even crueler, really, to really kiss Crowley and then still go to Heaven, right?

It's not a first kiss and at a bad time panic-- it's oh God, I think we broke it. It's the heartbreak of suddenly being in this place together where they aren't communicating well on any level and that going past having a verbal disagreement and into the pain of having an absolutely brutally bad kiss with someone with whom you've had countless passionate ones and the terror that it might be the last one and you're never going to feel any of that again.

That's happened to them before.

It's the brutal 1862 scene. Aziraphale in 1862's comment about The Agreement is the most embittered you won't touch me anymore thing ever. They've gone from The Arrangement in their looser, flirtier Globe Theatre era to now what Aziraphale calls The Agreement in 1862. The difference between an arrangement and an agreement is basically where the future is concerned. An agreement is, well, an agreement lol but it tends to be more formal, more restrained, while an arrangement is an agreement that contains more of a view to the future. It's a plan. You agree to meet up but you arrange how, basically. They don't have The Arrangement in 1862 anymore, they have The Agreement and it sounds like the exact fucking opposite of The Arrangement. The Agreement is "stay out of each other's way. Lend a hand, as needed," according to Aziraphale.

Read that again: "Stay out of each other's way. Lend a hand, as needed." See a problem here? If we're just talking about helping each other out with work assignments then this literally just doesn't make any sense at all as how can you both stay out of each other's way but lend a hand as needed? It's one or the other. It can't be both. It's "stay out of each other's way" when it comes to work assignments. It's "lend a hand, as needed" in their love life and Aziraphale is bitter as all holy fuck about it. They're barely having sex anymore.

That scene in 1862 actually also parallels part of the scene that contains Every. Funny how alike "we have a lot in common, you and me" sounds to what Crowley says in 2.06, isn't it? Dude has got to stop asking for holy water or to run away when they're both a mess-- it not working lol.

The point is that they've been together a long time and they've also both experienced a lot of trauma. They've have times where miscommunications snowballed and it felt broken beyond repair but it's not and it's not because they love each other and they eventually figure it out. That's part of the pain of Every, though, because what happened after Crowley came back from Hell in 1827 was bad and it took a long time to get to a better place with it but they did and better than before and then this kiss that they think could wind up being their last is a complete disaster straight out of the mid-1800s on top of the fact that they're in what feels like in the moment irreversible disagreement.

It's a painful kiss. It hurts to watch. It's supposed to. Not because they've never kissed before but because they've kissed a trillion times and this is by far the worst of the lot.

And these bastards decided it was the first one we should see lol. It's okay, though. These are coming soon, in the past and present:

#ineffable husbands #good omens #crowley #aziraphale #good omens meta #good omens s2 #aziracrow #good omens 2

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allthegothihopgirls · 4 days

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i need u all to know whenever you're reading one of my posts, behind that is little old me standing up on a dingy red stage, somewhere you'd stumble upon after following a string of dodgy coordinates. and i'm hesitantly holding a microphone and speaking into it with frequent stuttering and stumbling over my words, occasionally looking up from my cue cards to peek into the audience. and when the post ends, that's when i finish up and conclude with a "thank you thank you, what a terrific audience" and ashamedly shuffle off stage.

#and there's like. 4 people in the crowd. they're all standing as far away from each other as possible #shutting the fuck up and going to sleep now actually #gothihop speaks #aaaaaand post

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leonardcohenofficial · 2 years

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here’s the NYtimes interview with alan alda reflecting on the fiftieth anniversary of M*A*S*H (text below the cut)!!

By Saul Austerlitz Published Sept. 16, 2022 Updated Sept. 17, 2022, 1:10 p.m. ET

When we think of the default mode of much of contemporary television — mingling the tragic and the offhand, broad comedy and pinpoint sentiment — we are thinking of a precise mixture of styles, emotions and textures first alchemized by “M*A*S*H.”

Created by Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, “M*A*S*H” aired on CBS from 1972 to 1983. (It is currently available to stream on Hulu.) Over the course of its 11-year run, it featured alcohol-fueled high jinks and other shenanigans alongside graphic surgical sequences and portrayals of grief, blending comedy and drama in a fashion rarely seen before on television. Set among the doctors and nurses of a Korean War mobile surgical unit, “M*A*S*H” made use of the mockumentary episode decades before “The Office” ever tried it, featured blood-drenched story lines long before “The Sopranos” and killed off beloved characters without warning well before “Game of Thrones.”

The “M*A*S*H” series finale, titled “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen,” remains the most-watched non-Super Bowl program ever broadcast on American TV. The heart of the series was Alan Alda, who played the acerbic and devoted surgeon Hawkeye Pierce throughout the show’s more than 250 episodes and also wrote and directed dozens of them.

The actor revisited “M*A*S*H” in a video interview ahead of the show’s 50th anniversary, on Sept. 17. Alda, 86, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2015, discussed famous scenes, the series’s battles with CBS (“They didn’t even want us to show blood at the beginning”) and why he thinks the audience connected so deeply with “M*A*S*H.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

How have you been feeling?

Good, thank you. You mean with regard to Parkinson’s or the Covid or what?

All of the above, I suppose.

Parkinson’s I’m on top of. And I haven’t come down with Covid yet.

What does it mean to you to know that people are still interested in “M*A*S*H” 50 years later?

I got the script submitted to me when I was making a movie in the Utah State Prison. And it was the best script I had seen since I’d been in prison. I called my wife and I said: “This is a terrific script, but I don’t see how I can do it. Because we live in New Jersey, and it has to be shot in L.A. And who knows? It could run a whole year.” To go from that to 50 years later, it’s still getting, not only attention but it’s still getting an audience, is a surprise.

What kinds of conversations did you have with Larry Gelbart before the show began?

With “All in the Family,” I think the door was open to doing stories about things that really mattered. So when I got out of prison and went down to L.A. to talk to them, the night before we started rehearsing the pilot, I wanted us all to agree that we wouldn’t just have high jinks at the front. That it would take seriously what these people were going through. The wounded, the dead. You can’t just say it’s all a party. And we talked until about 1 in the morning at a coffee shop in Beverly Hills.

Do you feel there was a shift over the first season away from the booze-fueled humor of the early episodes?

Yeah, there was. Partly because people who were submitting story lines thought that that’s what was wanted. Larry Gelbart rewrote most of the shows the first season. Midway through the first season, there was a show called “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” and that was a real turning point. Because in that show, a friend of Hawkeye’s shows up among the wounded, and he dies on the operating table. That’s the moment where McLean Stevenson [as Lt. Col. Henry Blake] says: “There’s two rules in war: Young men die, and then Rule 2 is there’s nothing you can do about it.” Something like that. [The exact quote: “There are certain rules about a war. And rule No. 1 is young men die. And rule No. 2 is, doctors can’t change rule No. 1.”]

The network was furious about this. Some guy in charge of programming said, “What is this, a situation tragedy?” Soon after that, we were getting more popular. And the more popular you get, the less they complain.

Was CBS also concerned about the language used to tell these stories?

The most striking example to me was early in the series. Radar [Gary Burghoff] is explaining to somebody that he’s unfamiliar with something. And he said, “I’m a virgin at that, sir.” With no sexual context. It was just that he’d never done something before. And the CBS censor said: “You can’t say the word ‘virgin.’ That’s forbidden.” So the next week, Gelbart wrote a little scene that had nothing to do with anything. A patient is being carried through on a stretcher. And I say, “Where you from, son?” And he says, “The Virgin Islands, sir.”

Early in the show’s run, Gelbart and Reynolds went to South Korea and recorded 22 hours of interviews with doctors, nurses, pilots and orderlies there. How did those interviews make their way into story lines for the show?

We had reams of transcripts of those conversations. I would go through them looking for ideas for stories. And I could see that the other writers were doing the same thing, because there’d be circles around sentences and words. Sometimes one little phrase would spark the imagination of one of us, and that phrase could turn into a story.

Larry and Gene went to Korea at the end of the second season, and they got a lot of material for stories. But they had also found that we had, by paying attention to the lives that they lived, we had made up stories that were very similar to things that had actually happened.

People may not remember that you directed 32 episodes of “M*A*S*H” and wrote 19 episodes. How did you start getting interested in writing and directing?

At the end of the first season, I wrote a show called “The Longjohn Flap.” I borrowed the idea of “La Ronde,” but made it long johns instead because it was reflective of what their lives were like in the cold. I had been trying to learn writing since I was 8 years old. I wanted to be a writer before I wanted to be an actor.

Were there story lines that you thought “M*A*S*H” hadn’t quite tackled yet that you wanted to bring into the world of the show as a writer and director?

When I wrote, I tried to find out a little bit more about each of the characters. Who is Klinger [Jamie Farr] really? What was underneath — I almost said, what was underneath the dresses. [Laughs.] What was underneath the wearing of the dresses? Who was Margaret [Loretta Swit]?

I see on the internet that people assumed that because I was politically active, trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed, that in my writing I was trying to make political points, too. And I wasn’t. I really don’t like writing that passes as entertainment when it’s really propaganda. I want to hear a human story.

The unexpected death of Colonel Blake (McLean Stevenson) in the Season 3 finale, “Abyssinia, Henry,” remains one of the biggest surprises in television history. What was it like to shoot that sequence?

Gelbart showed me the scene. I think [it was] the morning of the shoot. I knew, but nobody else knew. He wanted to get everybody’s first-time reactions. And it really affected Gary Burghoff on camera. I think everybody was grateful for the shock.

It shocked the audience, too. I had a letter from a man who complained that he had to console his 10-year-old son who was sobbing. But it was one of the ways for the adults in the audience to realize that another aspect of war is that things happen that you don’t expect.

Was there ever a point when you got tired of fighting the Korean War on TV? The old joke is the show lasted almost four times as long as the actual war.

Around a year before we finally ended it, I felt we were getting toward the end of our ability to be fresh every week. I started suggesting that we do a final movie-length episode that really could end it. First of all, we were getting too old to play these people. And after you tell stories about a group of people 250 times, it’s hard not to repeat yourself or say things that sound like they’re supposed to be funny but aren’t really.

What did it mean to you to have Hawkeye leave Korea scarred by the death of a child in the final episode?

You just described exactly what I wanted to do with all the characters on the show. I was looking for stories, each in a different way, that showed how everybody left the war with a wound of some kind. Everybody had something taken from them. And Hawkeye was just one of them.

Earlier in your career, you had been on another great military comedy, “The Phil Silvers Show,” also known as “Sergeant Bilko.” What did you learn about acting from your pre-“M*A*S*H” TV work?

The first thing I learned on the “Bilko” show was you have to know your lines before you go in for the day’s work. I had come from the stage, where I would learn my lines during rehearsal. And the first thing they did is say, “OK, you’re up for your phone conversation,” where it’s a page of dialogue. It was an eye-opening experience. [Laughs.] I staggered through that.

Why do you think the audience connected so deeply with “M*A*S*H”?

Aside from really good writing and good acting and good directing, the element that really sinks in with an audience is that, as frivolous as some of the stories are, underneath it is an awareness that real people lived through these experiences, and that we tried to respect what they went through. I think that seeps into the unconscious of the audience.

They didn’t even want us to show blood at the beginning. In the pilot, the operating room was lit by a red light, so you couldn’t tell what was blood and what wasn’t. Which, once we got picked up, was ditched.

And giving us a feel for the circumstances that the real people had to go through, so that you could see that the crazy behavior wasn’t just to be funny. It was a way of separating yourself for a moment from the nastiness.

You can’t get as harsh as it really was.

Correction: Sept. 16, 2022 An earlier version of this article described in error the viewership statistics for the series finale of “M*A*S*H.” It was the most-watched non-Super Bowl program ever broadcast on American television, in terms of total audience, not the highest-rated non-Super Bowl program. A rating refers to the percentage of TV households that watch a program. The “M*A*S*H” finale remains the highest-rated program, of any kind, ever broadcast on American television.

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