Gelbart's resume more than `MASH' note

The man was more than the sum of his work

By BRIAN LOWRY

LARRY GELBART -- who died last week at the age of 81 -- was an awful easy guy for reporters to like. His writing career spanned TV history, he gave great quote, and he was bold enough (and available) to comment on virtually any topic. Days after the Sept. 11 attacks, he reassured the Los Angeles Times that no, the tragedy would not eradicate humor as we know it. "There will be World Trade Center jokes by the end of next week, I promise you," he said. "We do that as a form of denial. If we laugh at it, how scary can it be? So scary that we laugh about it."

When people were writing obituaries for all of network television because "Seinfeld" was going away, Gelbart sounded an equally sensible note. He laughed off the media frenzy surrounding the show's departure, telling me, "I think virtues are being attributed to the show (that) the people involved don't even claim for themselves. It's a show about a bunch of spiteful, mean-spirited people. It's fun, but it's hardly statue material."

Nevertheless, Gelbart welcomed the idea of a collective send-off, adding, "Anything that brings us together -- God knows there are enough things that keep us apart -- is good for the family that we are as a nation."

Leafing through his obituaries -- which not surprisingly began with adapting "MASH" for television, along with movies like "Tootsie" -- brought to mind that, as a critic, there was plenty to embrace about Gelbart as well, particularly in regard to two remarkably prescient and durable HBO movies he wrote at an age when most contemporaries were hard-pressed to find work: "Weapons of Mass Distraction" and "Barbarians at the Gate," in 1997 and 1993, respectively.

In its own way, each spoke to pervasive sickness in an American institution -- the earlier film exploring big business, the second an increasingly tawdry media.

Adapted from a book, "Barbarians" brought brilliant satire to high finance and inadulterated greed. Although it surrounded the battle over RJR Nabisco, the movie's look at wanton excess and ruthless corporate raiders has reverberated throughout coverage of the banking bailout and assorted financial scandals. Indeed, the details anticipated fresh outrages -- from Tyco's toga-party-throwing Dennis Kozlowski and his $6,000 shower curtain to AIG bonuses, Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme and Allen Sanford's alleged investment scam.

"Weapons," meanwhile, drew its inspiration from the then-feud between Rupert Murdoch and Ted Turner, casting Gabriel Byrne and Ben Kingsley as warring moguls whose battle over ownership of a pro sports franchise spills over into other facets of their media empires -- using newspapers and TV shows to jab at and bloody each other, yielding ample collateral damage in their wake.

Like the economic crisis, the ongoing pettiness between Fox News Channel and MSNBC -- and attempts to quell it -- has often aped Gelbart's script and its warnings about the perils of media consolidation. Watching News Corp.'s Fox News and the New York Post tag-team to assail NBC and GE execs can be grand sport, true, but the whole self-indulgent, tit-for-tat spectacle has little to do with journalism and must leave casual viewers/readers scratching their heads.

When "Weapons" aired, Gelbart told former Times critic Howard Rosenberg that such distractions "take our eye off the ball. We're more concerned with who is sleeping with whom, and who is having a baby. The real problems in America and in the world go unnoticed while the prurient side of us is appealed to." That's an appraisal that feels even more accurate now than it was then.

Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, who launched her writing career in the '70s when she became one of the first women Gelbart hired to work on "MASH," cited the writer's fearlessness as a constant source of admiration -- along with his ability to continue finding outlets for his talent.

"He could still stay on the field," she said. "He found a place to play."

While it's understandable that any farewell would open with a "MASH" note, to fully appreciate Gelbart's legacy, go watch those later HBO movies. Doing so, it's clear he wasn't content to ride into the sunset when that helicopter finally sailed off the horizon.