Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 10

Twenty years ago-it seems like just yesterday it burns for me with such clarity-during the 196465 television season, I learned a startling truth about working in the visual mediums of film and video. I was writing for a series you'll all recall t.i.tled The Outer Limits, and it was the most salutary experience I've ever had as a scenarist. It was the second year for that anthology of sf/fantasy stories; and because ABC-TV had decided they were going to cancel the show; and because it was more fiscally responsible for them to let it go one more season than to layout large amounts to replace it with something new; and because everyone involved, from production companies to the network itself, was skimming off the top: the budgets were tiny even for those frontier days of black-and-white. So in a very real way, no one was watching what we did. And we were able to write what we wanted to write, because no one really gave a d.a.m.n.

As long as we stayed within budget.

So that meant what we had available by way of special effects and expensive location shooting was minimal, and we had to subst.i.tute imagination.

The plots were more complex than what is usually doled out on network series, and we used misdirection, like "limbo" sets and suspense in place of Anderson opticals. We leaned heavily on characterization and inventiveness. The shows that came out of that wonderful season continue to be rerun in syndication. Not a year goes by that I don't receive tiny residual checks for my Outer Limits segments that continue to draw a viewership here and overseas. In England, several years ago, they were a primetime rage.

The startling truth that has become clear to me since I wrote those shows, having afterward worked on multimillion dollar productions, is that vast sums of money budgeted for science fiction films and television specials are more likely to produce an impediment to serious filmmaking than it is to grease the way to the production of films that we remember with pleasure. I'm sure there are exceptions to this rule-Alien and Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. and 2001: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey come immediately to mind-but they are glaring exceptions that seem, to me, only to b.u.t.tress the rule.

This startling truth intrudes on my perceptions as I view, this month, five films that range from minuscule budgets (by today's acromegalic standards) to bottom lines that would, in times past, have sent dozens of t.i.tanics down the nautical ways.

If Arthur (1981) gladdened your heart, and if you squirmed with pleasure in the warmth of that feeling, then I do not think you will regret my recommending Splash (Touchstone Films). By the time this review sees print, you may have to hunt beyond the first-run theaters for this marvelous minnow; but if you pa.s.sed it by on the grounds that the basic premise seemed silly, you'll find a reconsideration and the search eminently worthwhile. Because it is fitting and proper that Splash was one of the biggest moneymakers of the summer filmgoing season. It is a dear movie in the sense of that adjective as fondly-considered, honorable, heartfelt and scarce. Scarce, as in reasonably-priced.

It only cost eight million dollars (as opposed to $46 million for the unlovable Greystoke reviewed here last month); it was directed by a thirty-year-old actor best known for his tv sitcom role as straight-man to The Fonz, whose most outstanding previous directorial outing was the flawed Night Shift (1982) (as opposed to Greystoke's Oscar-winning Hugh Hudson); its leading man comes to the big screen directly from one of the more embarra.s.sing tv series in recent memory (as opposed to Greystoke's internationally-lauded cast); its special effects are so few and so subtle as to seem nonexistent (as opposed to Greystoke's $7 million-plus for Rick Baker's ape makeup alone); and it was distributed-and some say partially financed sub-rosa-as an independent production by Disney's Buena Vista (whose track record for fantasy is notable for The Black Hole [1979] and Tron [1982]); not to mention a basic plot premise so trivial it might have been rejected for one of the tripart.i.te segments of Fantasy Island (as opposed to the alleged canonical presentation of Burroughs's cla.s.sic novel).

Yet despite all those seeming drawbacks and question marks, Splash comes out of nowhere, with a minimum of screamhorn ballyhoo, to endear to us its director, Ron Howard, its leading man, Tom Hanks, its lovely female lead, Daryl Hannah, and the fledgling Touchstone Films, as a gentle, uplifting fantasy that puts most other gargantuan projects in the genre to shame. Most particularly Greystoke.

Splash is a love story, the romance between a likeable, average guy who runs a wholesale fruit and vegetable business in New York . . . and a, uh, er, a mermaid. Now hold it! Don't go running the other way. If you need pith and moment, you can salve your l.u.s.t for cheap entertainment with a perfectly acceptable rationalization that it's a cunning contemporary reworking of the Orpheus-Eurydice myth. Which it is, truly. Trust me on this one.

There is no need to explicate the story line further. It is more than strong enough to support the charming, faultless performances of Hanks, Hannah, Howard Morris and those two inspired escapees from SCTV, John Candy and Eugene Levy. (Candy, in fact, seems to me to be the worthy inheritor of Belushi's mantle, with a style and charisma that the late comedian never fully developed, for all the mythic revisionism attendant on his death.) Nor need more be said about the plot's twisty turns than to add that it provides a showcase for Ron Howard's abilities as a director: a talent as sure and as correctly self-effacing as that of Sturges or Capra. With this film the lisping Winthrop of The Music Man (1962), the freckled Opie of The Andy Griffith Show, the straight arrow Steve Bolander of American Graffiti (1973) and the incurably naive Richie Cunningham of Happy Days outperforms older and more extolled directors whose finest moments are not the blush on a b.u.t.terfly's wings to what Howard has done here so, well, endearingly.

One final word before I send you off to see Splash, a word about internal logic and the use of restrained, intelligent special effects.

A traditional mark of bad sf films has been the need to "explain" specious reasoning of plots and SFX. Long-winded oratorios that throw around gobble-dygook that confuses photons with protons, pa.r.s.ecs with light-years, oxides with oxhides. It is an indication that the makers of the film are ignorant, have perhaps read but not understood an Asimov essay, and hold the audience's intellect in contempt. Too much is said, too much is roundaboutly rationalized, too many flashing lights dominate the screen.

In Splash-take note all you parvenu filmmakers-we willingly suspend our disbelief that such a thing as a mermaid can exist, that such a creature could have a tail in the ocean and legs on land (as we never did in Miranda [1947] or Mister Peabody and the Mermaid [1948] no matter how beguiling Glynis Johns and Ann Blyth were as the sea-nymphs) because the scenarists and the production crew believe it! When you see Splash take note of the one brief conversation Eugene Levy has with Howie Morris, in which the rationale is established. It is, they say, because it is. Nothing further is needed. But it suffices because in the one special effect scene I can recall, gorgeous Daryl Hannah lies in the bathtub, runs her hand down her thigh . . . and it begins to pucker as with scales. C'est ca.

Both the most and the least a responsible film critic can say is that the third Star Trek movie is out, and Trek fans will love it. Like a high ma.s.s in Latin or the asking of the four questions at a Pa.s.sover seder, films continuing the television adventures of the familiar crew of the starship Enterprise are formalized ritual. Without all that has gone before-the original NBC series (196669), a Sat.u.r.day morning animated version (197375), endless novelizations, a cult following that has sp.a.w.ned its own mini-fandom replete with gossipzines, newszines and even a flourishing underground of soft-core Kirk-shtups-Spock p.o.r.nzines-these films would be non-events. (Though I am told that results of a studio-fostered research sample gathered from an audience last March 17th imparted the confusing statistic that 44% of those queried were "unfamiliar with Star Trek." I cannot explain this intelligence.) But it is all True Writ now, and these movies need not be judged as if they were Film, or Story, or even Art. What it is, bro, is a growth industry.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (Paramount) seems less interesting than ST II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) but infinitely better than the first feature-length adventure of them as boldly went where no man had gone before, Star Trek-The Motion Picture (1979). I'm not sure that's saying much, except to point out that producer-writer Harve Bennett has had the sense to keep creator Gene Roddenberry in a figurehead mode, thus permitting a savvy commercial recycling of time-tested and much-beloved tropes; and by allowing Leonard Nimoy to direct this film, Bennett has kept Spock in the fold: a canny solution by a minister without portfolio of the th.o.r.n.y problem posed by an indispensable star who wanted out.

And with but minor flaws easily credited to, and excused by, this being Nimoy's first major stint behind the camera, he has done a commendable yeoman job. There is, for instance, a pleasing easiness in the performances by the "regulars"; a result (I am told by several of the actors) of Nimoy's sensitivity in directing them as actors and not, as in past films directed by Wise and Meyer, as mere b.u.t.ton-pushing background, as foils for the "stars" and the SFX whizbang.

There are a few interesting new moments this time: Christopher Lloyd's Klingon villain (strongest in the earlier stages of his appearance onscreen, before he converts from the guttural alien tongue to English); a 6-track Dolby stereo sound system designed to blast you out of the Cineplex box whereat you'll be screening the film; a nice sense of alien landscape on the Genesis Planet, especially the scenes of snow falling on giant cactus; the Klingon "Bird of Prey" battle cruiser.

Contrariwise, there are the usual problems: no one, not even Nimoy-as-Director, seems able to tone down William Shatner's need to mouth embarra.s.sing and spuriously portentous plat.i.tudes as if he were readying himself to play the t.i.tle role in the life story of Charlton Heston; the fine cast of "regulars" is once again denied extended scenes in which their talents can be displayed, in lieu of Shatner's scene-hogging and the expected flaunting of expensive special effects; Robin Curtis, replacing Kirstie Alley as the Vulcan Lt. Saavik, is as memorable as spaetzle; and the plot makes virtually no sense if examined closely.

But neither the positives nor the negatives of such effete critiques matter as much as a dollop of owl sweat. Star Trek has become, obviously, a biennial booster shot for Trekkies, Trekkers, Trekists, and fellow-trekelers. And as such, places itself as far beyond relevant a.n.a.lysis as, say, James Bond or Muppets movies.

The most and the least a responsible film critic can say is that the third Star Trek movie is out, and Trek fans will love it. For the rest of us, it's better than a poke in the eye with a flaming stick.

The Ice Pirates (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is so ludicrous it ought to be enshrined in the Academy of Dumb Stuff with such other sterling freaks of nature as the lima bean, poison ivy, the Edsel and the singing of Billy Idol. A s.p.a.ce opera that melds (and this is how they're selling it) Star Wars (1977) with Captain Blood (1935), this poor gooney bird of a movie has all the grace and charm of a heavy object falling downstairs.

If you accept the basic premise that the story takes place in a distant galaxy where the rarest, most valuable commodity is water, and that buccaneer swash-bucklers make raids on the incredibly evil Templar Empire to hijack ice cubes from their interstellar refrigerator tankers, then I have some dandy land in the Sarga.s.so Sea for sale that I think you'd like a lot. Furnished.

The acting, keynoted by performances by Robert Urich (late of the tv series Vega$) and Mary Crosby (who tried to kill J. R. Ewing on Dallas), makes one look back with fondness on the thespic abilities of Jon Hall and Vera Hruba Ralston, Audie Murphy and Jack Webb.

This is the sort of thalidomide offspring of Battlestar Ponderosa that ought to be led out of the theater wearing a Hartz Flea Collar.

And yet, may Allah forgive me, there is a devil-may-care quality to this moronic sport that lingers with affection in the memory. There are moments-as when one robot kicks another in the nuts-that plumb such Olympian depths of stupidity that one must credit co-author/director Stewart Raffill with a degree of chutzpah unknown since Hitler opined he could conquer Russia in the wintertime.

I cannot in conscience recommend this film, but if you're the sort of entertainment-seeker who ain't embarra.s.sed when the pregnant lady comes out of the audience to do a full striptease on amateur night at The Pink p.u.s.s.ycat, this may be just the grotesquerie for you. If so, don't write to thank me for the tip.

It's not nice, I know, to tempt you with a review of a wonderful film you may never be able to see, but having been privileged to attend a screening of The Quest (Okada International), a short film produced and directed by Saul and Elaine Ba.s.s, written by Ray Bradbury and based on his 1946 Planet Stories allegory, "Frost and Fire," I must risk your censure in hopes that some convention committee will bust its buns laying on a showing of this remarkable fantasy.

The film (as was so with the novella) operates off a lovely, simple idea: a race of humanoid creatures has a life span of merely eight days. They are born, live and die in the place where they have always dwelled, but a hunger burns in them to know what lies "beyond," out there. Yet by the time an emissary to out-there grows old enough to be trained for the journey, s/he is doomed to death before s/he can reach the goal. The film is the journey finally made by one of these people, set on the path as a child.

Saul Ba.s.s, whom cineastes correctly hold in awe for his innovative main t.i.tles on The Man with the Golden Arm (1955), Around the World in Eighty Days (1956), Anatomy of a Murder (1960), North By Northwest (1960), Psycho (1961), Exodus (1962), Walk on the Wild Side (1963), and forty other major films, who directed the shower sequence in Psycho and the final battle sequence in Spartacus (1961), and whose short films include the unforgettable Why Man Creates (1968), has done with live action and animation what studios spending millions have not been able to do: he has conveyed the ephemeral magic of Bradbury's world-view without awkwardness in translation, without stilted dialogue or precious pomposity.

In less than half an hour of the most incredibly affecting visuals since the exundation of computer-generated graphics attendant on Star Wars and its horde of imitations, Ba.s.s and Bradbury have brought forth a small miracle of cinematic wisdom and beauty. I cannot recommend it too highly.

At present no plans are on line for commercial distribution, but schools, libraries, colleges and accredited convention committees can obtain The Quest in 16mm or videotape either through Pyramid Films, in Santa Monica, California, or by direct arrangement with Saul Ba.s.s/Herb Yager and a.s.sociates in Los Angeles. Acquisition is hardly difficult if desire exists.

It is my hope that I've whetted the appet.i.tes of those who program films for sf conventions. Before the next imprudent and morally reprehensible scheduling of such dreck as John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) or one of those detestable Friday the 13th/Halloween pukers, let those who pretend to some affection for film, who announce their respect for convention attendees, locate The Quest and showcase it. In their lemminglike rush to saturate film programs with dross, scheduling officials would be enn.o.bled by a sober shake of the head and the presentation of an important little film that is about something more meaningful than ma.s.s slaughter by devious means.

Of the many low blows leveled against Scott Joplin, the great ragtime composer, by a universe that seemed determined to keep him unknown in his lifetime, one of the most unfair was his scandalous treatment by the organizers of the famous "Louisiana Purchase Exposition," the St. Louis Expo of 1904.

Joplin was by far the most popular musician of his day. Yet the nabobs who styled themselves arbiters of taste in those post-Victorian times of Late George Apley a.n.a.l retention considered his work the merest popular trash, fit only for nautch houses and performances on streetcorners.

After a long and bitter struggle, Joplin's publisher managed to get the Exposition to invite Joplin to perform as one of a number of "American artists." It was a grudging invitation, and they set up the great black innovator in one miserable booth . . . next door to John Philip Sousa's augmented march band.

Joplin and his exquisite little rags were, perforce, blown away by the bra.s.sy riptide of Sousa's martial maelstrom. In the cacophony of "Under the Double Eagle" no one paid pennyfarthing attention to the wonder of "The Cascades."

Preceding as paradigm.

I opened this column with the observation that too often a large budget gets in the way of a good film being made-as witness Greystoke at $46 million-while a reasonable financial outlay (for these inflated days) forces the producers to use imagination instead of flash&filigree-as witness Splash at $8 million. Concomitant to this theory is the demonstrated truth that films on which so much lucre has been expended get a sales campaign that blasts out of the public consciousness those possibly better films whose budgets don't include a 24-hour-a-day television blitz.

The horrible reality of that low blow trembles in my thoughts as I come to the film I've saved for last: what may be one of the most memorable sf films ever made, a textbook example of how to make a motion picture in this genre skillfully, inexpensively, and imaginatively, but a film that may, like the delicate tracery of Scott Joplin's work, be outblasted by the bra.s.sy special effects monstrosities being pushed so hard by studios with megabucks invested in inferior product.

I speak of Iceman (Universal). And I say it is magnificent.

I suggest that Iceman may well be one of those cla.s.sic films utilizing the furniture of sf to illuminate the human condition that both aficionados and mundanes will overlook, or not even consider sf, as happened to two of the finest movies ever made in our realm: Seconds (1966) and Charly (1968). Overlooked entirely or, at best, quickly forgotten in the Doppler effect created by the pa.s.sage of Jedis, Greystokes, firestarters and other a.s.sorted treks.

The story: a mining and exploration company, drilling in the Arctic above the 66th parallel, excises a block of ice in which a living Neanderthal has been frozen for 40,000 years. He is revived, he is sequestered in an immense terrarium for study, and communication is established with him.

It is not a new idea. (Richard Ben Sapir does it with greater panache and innovation in his outstanding 1978 novel, The Far Arena, which I commend to your attention.) But within the scope of this uncomplicated plotline, such riches of drama, humanism, compa.s.sion and philosophical depth have been thrown up onto the screen that Iceman becomes no less than a shining icon of cinematic High Art.

The Australian director of The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978) and Barbarosa (1982), Fred Schepisi, has been imported by producer Norman Jewison; and he brings to this film the undeniable brio that seems to mark the work of this entire generation of Aussie directors-Peter Weir, George Miller, Bruce Beresford, Gillian Armstrong-a pa.s.sion and intelligence against which we in America dare to throw the likes of De Palma, Landis, Ashby, Colin Higgins or Mark Lester. Based on a story by John Drimmer, the screenplay by Chip Proser and Drimmer is a model of clarity and foreshadowing. Engaging performances by Timothy Hutton as the anthropologist who becomes the prehistoric man's teacher and companion, and Lindsay Crouse as the project director, b.u.t.tress and resonate to the absolutely astonishing acting done by the cla.s.sically-trained (at the Chin Chiu Academy of the Peking Opera) Eurasian John Lone as "Charlie," the man frozen in time.

It is beyond words to attempt a characterization of the effulgence Lone brings to what might have been no better than a reprise of Victor Mature vaudeville grunting. There is a world of pathos and n.o.bility in Lone's iceman, and if there is a G.o.d, Lone will be onstage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion next year at Oscar time.

But more than superb acting and intelligent story, Iceman reaches toward questions that burn fiercely at the core of the human equation.

And in the final moments, when it seems that an insoluble situation has been constructed from which no satisfying egress exists, the scenarists, director and actors give us a finale that lifts our arms to the skies, that raises our eyes to the heavens, in precisely the bodily position the iceman was first found. As one who despises counterfeit emotion a la Love Story (1970), who does not cheer for the Rockys of this world, who winces at the cheap manipulation of much contemporary cinema, I found it difficult to admit that I was sitting with tears at the final freeze-frame of Iceman.

This is what filmmaking is all about.

It was made for less than ten million dollars. If you see it, you will never forget it.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / September 1984 INSTALLMENT 3:.

In Which We Scuffle Through The Embers

If tomorrow's early edition of the New York Times bore the headline STEPHEN KING NAMED AS DE LOREAN DRUG CONNECTION, it would not by one increment lessen the number of Stephen King books sold this week. Goose the total, more likely.

If Tom Brokaw's lead on the NBC news tonight is, "The King of Chiller Writers, Stephen King, was found late this afternoon in the show window of Saks Fifth Avenue, biting the heads off parochial school children and pouring hot lead down their necks," it would not for an instant slow the rush of film producers to put under option his every published word. Hasten the pace, more likely.

If your cousin Roger from Los Angeles, who works for a food catering service that supplies meals to film companies working on location, called to pa.s.s along the latest hot bit of ingroup s...o...b..z gossip, and he confided, "You know Steve King, that weirdo who writes the scary novels? Well, get this: he worked with Errol Flynn as a secret agent for the n.a.z.is during World War II!" it would not drop the latest King tome one notch on the Publishers Weekly bestseller listings. Pop it to the top of the chart, more likely.

Stephen King is a phenomenon sui generis. I've been told he is fast approaching (if he hasn't already reached it) the point of being the bestselling American author of all time. In a recent survey taken by some outfit or other-and I've looked long and hard for the item but can't find it so you'll have to trust me on this-it was estimated that two out of every five people observed reading a paperback in air terminals or bus stations or suchlike agorae were snout-deep in a King foma.

There has never been anything like King in the genre of the fantastic. Whether you call what he writes "horror stories" or "dark fantasy" or "imaginative thrillers," Stephen King is the undisputed, hands-down, nonpareil, free-form champ, three falls out of three.

This is a Good Thing.

Not only because King is a better writer than the usual gag of bestseller epigones who gorge the highest reaches of the lists-the Judith Krantzes, Sidney Sheldons, Erich Segals and V. C. Andrewses of this functionally illiterate world-or because he is, within the parameters of his incurably puckish nature, a "serious" writer, or because he is truly and in the face of a monumental success that would warp the rest of us, a good guy. It is because he is as honest a popular writer as we've been privileged to experience in many a year. He writes a good stick. He never cheats the buyer of a King book. You may or may not feel he brought off a particular job when you get to page last, but you never feel you've been had. He does the one job no writer may ignore at peril of tar and feathers, he delivers.

Sometimes what he delivers is as good as a writer can get in his chosen milieu, as in Carrie and The Shining and The Dead Zone and The Dark Tower. Sometimes he's just okay, as in Cujo or Christine. And once in a while, as in the Night Shift and Different Seasons collections, he sings way above his range. (And those of us who have been privileged to read the first couple of sections of "The Plant," King's work-in-progress privately printed as annual holiday greeting card, perceive a talent of uncommon dimensions.) So why is it that films made from Stephen King's stories turn out, for the most part, to be movies that look as if they'd been chiseled out of Silly Putty by escapees from the Home for the Terminally Inept?

This question, surely one of the burning topics of our troubled cosmos, presents itself anew upon viewing Firestarter (Universal), Dino De Laurentiis's latest credential in his struggle to prove to the world that he has all the artistic sensitivity of a piano bench. Based on Steve King's 1980 novel, and a good solid novel it was, this motion picture is (forgive me) a burnt-out case. We're talking scorched earth. Smokey the Bear would need a sedative. Jesus wept. You get the idea.

The plot line is a minor key-change on the basic fantasy concept King used in Carrie. Young female with esper abilities as a pyrotic. (Because the people who make these films think human speech is not our natural tongue, they always gussie up simple locutions so their prolixity will sound "scientific." Pyrotic was not good enough for the beanbags who made this film, so they keep referring to the firestarter as "a possessor of pyrokinetic abilities." In the Kingdom of the Beanbags a honey-dipper is a "Defecatory Residue Repository Removal Supervisor for On-Site Effectation.") The conflict is created by the merciless hunt for the firestarter-eight-year-old Charlene "Charlie" McGee, played by Drew Barrymore of E.T. fame-that is carried out by a wholly improbable government agency alternately known as the Department of Scientific Intelligence and "The Shop." Charlie and her daddy, who also has esper abilities, though his seem to shift and alter as the plot demands, are on the run. The Shop has killed Charlie's mommy, for no particularly clear reason, and they want Charlie for their own nefarious purposes, none of which are logically codified; but we can tell from how oily these three-piece-suiters are, that Jack Armstrong would never approve of their program. Charlie and her daddy run, The Shop gnashes its teeth and finally sends George C. Scott as a comic-book hit man after them; and they capture the pair; and they run some special effects tests; and Charlie gets loose; and a lot of people go up in flames; and daddy and the hit man and the head of The Shop all get smoked; and Charlie hitchhikes back to the kindly rustic couple who thought it was cute when she looked at the b.u.t.ter and made it melt.

The screenplay by Stanley Mann, who did not disgrace himself with screen adaptations of The Collector and Eye of the Needle, here practices a craft that can best be described as creative typing. Or, more in keeping with technology, what he has wrought now explains to me the previously nonsensical phrase "word processing." As practiced by Mr. Mann, this is the processing of words in the Cuisinart School of h.o.m.ogeneity.

The direction is lugubrious. As windy and psychotic as Mann's scenario may be, it is rendered even more tenebrous by the ponderous, lumbering, pachydermal artlessness of one Mark L. Lester (not the kid-grown-up of Oliver!). Mr. Lester's fame, the curriculum vita, that secured for him this directional sinecure, rests on a quagmire base of Truck Stop Women, Bobbie Joe and the Outlaw (starring Lynda Carter and Marjoe Gortner, the most fun couple to come along since Tracy and Hepburn, Gable and Lombard, Cheech and Chong), Stunts and the awesome Roller Boogie. The breath do catch, don't it!

Like the worst of the television hacks, who tell you everything three times-Look, she's going to open the coffin! / She's opening the coffin now! / Good lord, she opened the coffin!-Lester and Mann reflect their master's contempt for the intelligence of filmgoers by endless soph.o.m.oric explanations of things we know, not the least being a tedious rundown on what ESP is supposed to be.

The acting is shameful. From the cynical use of "name stars" in cameo roles that they might as well have phoned in, to the weary posturing of the leads, this is a drama coach's nightmare. Louise Fletcher sleepwalks through her scenes like something Papa Doc might have resurrected from a Haitian graveyard; Martin Sheen, whose thinnest performances in the past have been marvels of intelligence and pa.s.sion, has all the range of a Barry Manilow ballad; David Keith with his constantly bleeding nose is merely ridiculous; and Drew Barrymore, in just two years, has become a puffy, petulant, self-conscious "actor," devoid of the ingenuousness that so endeared her in E.T.

And what in the world has happened to George C. Scott's previously flawless intuition about which scripts to do? It was bad enough that he consented to appear as the lead in Paul Schrader's loathsome Hardcore; but for him willingly to a.s.say the role of John Rainbird, the ponytailed Amerind government a.s.sa.s.sin, and to perform the part of what must surely be the most detestable character since Joyboy's mother in The Loved One; Divine in Pink Flamingos or Jabba the Hut with a verve that borders on teeth-gnashing, is beyond comprehension. It has been a while since I read the novel, but it is not my recollection that the parallel role in the text possessed the McMartin Pre-School child molester mien Scott presents. It is a jangling, counter-productive, unsavory element that is, hideously, difficult to sweep from memory. That it is in some squeamish-making way memorable, is not to Scott's credit. It is the corruption of his talent.

Dino De Laurentiis is the Irwin Allen of his generation: coa.r.s.e, lacking subtlety, making films of vulgar pretentiousness that personify the most venal att.i.tudes of the industry. He ballyhoos the fact that he had won two Oscars, but hardly anyone realizes they were for Fellini's La Strada and Nights of Cabiria in 1954 and 1957-and let's not fool ourselves, even if the publicity flaks do: those are Fellini films, not De Laurentiis films-long before he became the cottage industry responsible for Death Wish, the remakes of King Kong and The Hurricane, the travesty known as Flash Gordon, Amityville II and Amityville 3-D, Conan the Barbarian and the embarra.s.sing King of the Gypsies.

But Dino De Laurentiis is precisely the sort of intellect most strongly drawn to the works of Stephen King. He is not a lone blade of gra.s.s in the desert. He is merely the most visible growth on the King horizon. Stephen King has had nine films made from his words, and there is a formulaic reason why all but one or two of those films have been dross.

Next time I'll try to codify that reason.

Until then, and more about these films later, go see Repo Man (if you can find it) and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Avoid with all your might Streets of Fire. Don't miss Ghostbusters. And prepare yourself to avoid all reviews and blandishments that will suggest you see Gremlins, one of the most purely evil films ever visited on the filmgoing public.

I will deal at length with each of these as soon as I blight my friendship with Stephen King.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / October 1984 INSTALLMENT 4:.

In Which We Discover Why The Children Don't Look Like Their Parents

Pinter works, though he shouldn't; and I'll be d.a.m.ned if I can discern why; he just does. Bradbury and Hemingway don't; and I think I can figure out why they don't, which is a clue to why Stephen King doesn't, either. Xenogenesis seems to be the question this time around, and if you'll go to your Unabridged and look it up, I'll wait right here for you and tell you all about it when you get back.

Times pa.s.ses. Leaves flying free from a calendar. The seasons change. The reader returns from the Unabridged.

Now that we understand the meaning of the word Xenogenesis, let us consider why it is that King's books-as seemingly hot for metamorphosis as any stuff ever written by anyone-usually wind up as deranged as Idi Amin and as cruel as January in Chicago and as unsatisfying as s.e.x with the pantyhose still on: why it is that the children, hideous and crippled offspring, do not resemble their parents.

First, I can just imagine your surprise when I point out that this thing King has been around in the literary consciousness a mere ten years. It was just exactly an eyeblink decade ago that the schoolteacher from Maine wrote: n.o.body was really surprised when it happened, not really, not at the subconscious level where savage things grow . . . Showers turning off one by one, girls stepping out, removing pastel bathing caps, toweling, spraying deodorant, checking the clock over the door. Bras were hooked, underpants stepped into . . . Calls and catcalls rebounded with all the snap and flicker of billiard b.a.l.l.s after a hard break . . . Carrie turned off the shower. It died in a drip and a gurgle . . . It wasn't until she stepped out that they all saw the blood running down her leg.

Second, I'll bet none of you realized what a fluke it was that King took off so abruptly. Well, here's the odd and unpredictable explanation, conveyed because I happened to be there when it happened. (Who else would tell you this stuff, gang?) Doubleday had purchased Carrie for a small advance. It was, in the corporate cosmos, just another mid-list t.i.tle, a spooky story to be marketed without much foofaraw among the first novels, the "learn to love your brown rice and get svelte thighs in 30 minutes" offerings, the books one finds in the knockoff catalogues nine months later at $1.49 plus a free shopping bag. But King's editor read that opening sequence in which the telekinetic, Carrie White, gets her first menstrual experience before the eyes of a covey of teenage shrikes, and more than the lightbulb in the locker room exploded. Xeroxes of the ma.n.u.script were run off; they were disseminated widely in-house; women editors pa.s.sed them on to female secretaries, who took them home and gave them to their friends. That first scene bit hard. It was the essence of the secret of Stephen King's phenomenal success: the everyday experience raised to the mythic level by the application of fantasy to a potent cultural trope. It was Jungian archetype goosed with ten million volts of emotional power. It was the commonly-shared horrible memory of half the population, reinterpreted. It was the flash of recognition, the miracle of that rare instant in which readers dulled by years of reading artful lies felt their skin stretched tight by an encounter with artful truth.

Stephen King, in one emblematic image, had taken control of his destiny.

I'm not even sure Steve, for all his self-knowledge, has an unvarnished perception of how close he came to remaining a schoolteacher who writes paperback originals as a hobby and to supplement the family income in his spare time when he's not too f.a.gged out from extracurricular duties at the high school.

But just as Ian Fleming became an "overnight success" when John F. Kennedy idly mentioned that the James Bond books-which had been around for years-were his secret pa.s.sion; just as Dune took off in paperback years after its many rejections by publishers and its disappointing sale in hardcover, when Frank Herbert came to be called "the father of Earth Day" and the novel was included in The Whole Earth Catalog; just as Joseph h.e.l.ler, Joseph h.e.l.ler's agent, Joseph h.e.l.ler's publisher and the Eastern Literary Establishment that had trashed Catch-22 when it was first published, began trumpeting h.e.l.ler's genius when another literary agent (not h.e.l.ler's), named Candida Donadio, ran around New York jamming the book under people's noses, telling them it was a new American cla.s.sic; in just that inexplicable, unpredictable, magic way, Doubleday's in-house interest spread. To Publishers Weekly, to the desk of Bennett Cerf, to the attention of first readers for the film studios on the Coast, to the sales force mandated to sell that season's line, to the bookstore buyers, and into the c.o.c.ktail-party chatter of the word-of-mouth crowd. The word spread: this Carrie novel is hot.

And the readers were rewarded. It was hot: because King had tapped into the collective unconscious with Carrie White's ordeal. The basic premise was an easy one to swallow, and once down, all that followed was characterization. That is the secret of Stephen King's success in just ten years, and it is the reason why, in my view, movies based on King novels never resemble the perfectly decent novels that inspired them.

In films written by Harold Pinter as screenplay, or in films based on Pinter plays, it is not uncommon for two people to be sitting squarely in the center of a two-shot speaking as follows: CORA: (c.o.c.kney accent) Would'ja like a nice piece of fried bread for breakfast, Bert?

BERT: (abstracted grunting) Yup. Fried bread'd be nice.

CORA: Yes . . . fried bread is nice, in't it?

BERT: Yuh. I like fried bread.

CORA: Well, then, there 'tis: Nice fried bread.

BERT: It's nice fried bread.

CORA: (pleased) Is it nice, then?