M*A*S*H 4077th
It all started with a book written by Dr. Richard Hornberger as he sat waiting for patients at his offices in Bremen, Maine. Using the pseudonym Richard Hooker it was a fictional account of his years at the 8055 Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea. He based Hawkeye on. Hornberger wrote a number of books featuring the same characters but non were as successful as the first.
The movie rights to Dr. Hornberger's book were bought for $100,000 by Ingo Preminger and a screenplay was written by Ring Lardner Jr. who had been blacklisted by Hollywood in the fifties.
It was William Self (the president of Twentieth Century Fox) who turned the movie into a television series. With the movie set still available and with Fox owning the rights to the story he knew the series would be inexpensive to produce. He hired Gene Reynolds to produce (Reynolds had himself been a child actor), who in turn contacted his friend Larry Gelbart to write a script for the pilot show (Gelbart had visited Korea while working as a gag writer for Bob Hope). Reynolds then hired Burt Metcalfe as associate producer and casting director.
The series lasted 11 years with 251 episodes made. It won countless awards and the final show was one of the most watched television programs ever.
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