“I had written a blurb for my friend Roger Kahn’s book about Jews in America, The Passionate People, which the publishers, William Morrow, apparently liked so much they asked me to do one or a new book they were publishing called MASH [by Richard Hooker]… I saw a way to put together what were really separate short stories about the same people in the same location and make a movie of it, and I gave the book to my friend [the agent-producer] Ingo Preminger [Otto Preminger's brother], who shared my enthusiasm. We gave it and a pitch to Richard Zanuck and David Brown, and they made a deal with Ingo’s company to buy the rights and produce a movie.

“The book was uneven in style and credibility, with some incidents that were just too wild and improbable to be acceptable in a movie. I took some of the main incidents, invented a couple more, and organized them into a continuity that I thought would work, even though it violated the cardinal rule that a story involves a change of character in one or more of the principals. In my adaptation, the main characters were the same all the way through, and the illusion of a story had to be sustained by the action and the comedy.

“For about two minutes, Ingo and I discussed making it Vietnam instead of Korea and quickly realized the war that was still going on was just too close to many people for us to be funny or properly irreverent about it. By keeping it the Korean War, we could satirize the whole idea of American involvement in Asia, which consisted to a large extent of bringing American institutions like football over there instead of learning whatAasia and its institutions were all about.

“[Robert] Altman made many changes in the script, and most of them were, in my opinion, beneficial… He added the business of the stolen jeep at the beginning and the subplot of an affair between nurse Leslie and Colonel Blake. He greatly expanded the use of the public address system; he kep the character of Hot Lips in the latter part of the story; he cut the death of Ho Jon after shooting it; he revised the ending; and he added several significant piece of dialogue, including what is probably the biggest laugh; Dago Red’s “He was drafted.”

– Ring Lardner Jr. on how he came to write the screenplay for the movie MASH