Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 19

No.

I've had it.

I can bear no more. This time I was going to inveigh once again about the juvenilizing of our beloved cinematic art-form, lamenting the horrors visited upon Ridley Scott's Legend and comparing it to Labyrinth (which, like Return to Oz, was never given a fair shake by the press or the critical apparatchiks); I was going to conclude with stunning summation the theses advanced in the last two or three columns, using as ghastly examples The Manhattan Project, Ladyhawke, Sword of the Valiant (aka Gawain and the Green Knight), s.p.a.ce-Camp, D.A.R.Y.L. and all the limping, lurching, broken-backed, blind in one eye illogicalities I've savaged here these past months, from Gremlins to Young Sherlock Holmes . . . but I'm simply not up to it. I've been receiving letters from many of you, pleading for respite. Agreeing, with sobs and defeated expressions, that this has been a period of a.s.sault on our tolerance for the imperfect unparalleled in moviemaking history; an a.s.sault that makes the dreadful indulgences of Pee-Wee Herman (whose voice, you will learn here for the first time, was used as that of Max, the sentient s.p.a.ceship, in Navigator) seem by comparison to be of a stature with the thespic joys of Sirs Gielgud, Olivier and Richardson. Pleading for a brief break from the shrieks of anguish I let out every time one of these spikes is driven into my critic's perception. And at last, finally, I agree. I can say no more for a while. There is apparently no bottoming-out of this trend toward imbecile filmmaking. Every week brings new and more loathsome product; and at last even I am unhorsed.

So I will toss out all my notes on those films.

Happily will I heave a sigh of relief (and do I hear an echo from out there where you lie on your back gasping for surcease?) and let those earwigs, maggots, c.o.c.kroaches and gnats live their brief lives in your theaters, never again to be available for swatting if you are smart and don't watch them on cable television.

I will go to another insect, with high recommendations. I will tell you that if you missed David Cronenberg's remake of The Fly (20th Century Fox), you missed one of the most exciting motion pictures of the year. Unlike Invaders from Mars, which began with dreck from its first version in 1953, and was recently remade in an updated, equally as dreckoid version, The Fly uses lovingly-remembered but nonetheless trivial material-the 1958 "Help me! Help me!" version and two abominable sequels (1959 & 1965)-to form a basis for Cronenberg's latest installment in his celluloid tract on the concept of the New Flesh.

What's that? A new filmic philosophy? Something we can buzz a word at? Oh, ripping, we all say . . . lay it on us, Oh Observer of Pop Art.

And I will. Next time. I want to discuss Cronenberg at length, because I've been sorta muttering for several years that of all the wise guy directors currently a.s.saulting us, only Cronenberg has the intellectual virility and talent to become sui generis. In Scanners, The Brood, Videodrome and now The Fly, Cronenberg has leapfrogged his own triumphs and failures to become a director/writer with a voice and a view of the world that could be as important, in its own bizarre way, as that of Hitchc.o.c.k, Ford, Wilder or Woody Allen.

But I need s.p.a.ce for such a discussion, and next time I will allocate that s.p.a.ce for myself, The Omnipresent Ferman permitting.

And until then, go to see Coppola's Peggy Sue Got Married (Tri-Star), written by Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner, which is what Back to the Future wanted to be. It is almost exactly the same story, told from the viewpoint of a woman, rather than that of a simpy, affected, smarta.s.s Michael J. Fox; it is time travel and wish-fulfillment treated maturely, rather than simplistically and for yocks; it is adult and sincere and entertaining and everything right that Back to the Future did wrong. When I sat in that Hugo awards audience in Atlanta last Labor Day, and saw Back to the Future beat out Brazil for the statuette, I felt my heart sink. It was a travesty, and in that moment I hated those of you who voted for best film, condemning you in my mind to nothing better than Back to the Future. Ever!

But even the most benumbed of you must gleam in the eye of the universe, for you have been given a chance to see the error of your ways. It has been given to you, the possibility of actually comparing what-was with what-might-be. You can go to the theater and see Peggy Sue Got Married, waltz up the street to the video shoppe to rent Back to the Future, take it home, and compare-while the memory of Peggy Sue is still fresh-idiocy and counterfeit emotion and cheap laughs and adolescent bulls.h.i.t with a mature dream entertainingly spun at proper length.

I cannot recommend Peggy Sue Got Married highly enough. I only hope when you make the comparison, that you have not been so hornswoggled that you cannot perceive the quantum leap in excellence and honesty between them.

Having now attempted to do some social work among the artistically impoverished, I go away to regain that sweetness of nature I once possessed, before having been slimed by ka-ka for what seems an eternity.

Hoping you are the same . . .

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/February 1987 INSTALLMENT 22:.

In Which The Land Echoes To The Sound Of An Ox Of A Different Color Being Gored

So this toothless, wild-eyed old bag lady comes up to me on the street, and she grabs hold of my sleeve, and she says, "Once upon a time, in a land so far away and so miserably poor that they couldn't even afford a timezone, there lived an authentic Village Wretch whose chief social activities were cadging cantaloupe rinds and vomiting on people's shoes."

This went on for years (she continued, in an auctorial typographic device that relieved me of the burden of having to use quotation marks) until one day an upwardly-mobile wayfaring stranger came to town, and he looked around, and he decided there was room for a second-string, sort of wide-receiver Village Wretch; and he began cadging cantaloupe rinds and puking on people's shoes. He wasn't bad at it-something of a comer, everyone said-until one day he beat the original Village Wretch to an especially tasty cantaloupe rind, and then he yorked all over the penny loafers of the original Village Wretch, who made a big Who-Struck-John of it, brought the newcomer up on charges, and had him stoned to death.

She stood there staring at me, did the bag lady, as she concluded this touching tale of cottage industry; and I said, "What is the underlying moral of this midrash, a Seer of the Streets?"

And she said, "Give me two dollars and fifty cents or I will breathe Barbasol breath on you." So I gave it to her, and she slumped away, leaving me in an acute state of Anecdotus Interruptus; and I went about my business, deeply troubled in mind unto the Tenth Generation, until a few weeks ago when, at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, west-on which I sit here in Hollywood until September when my term is up and I'll be set free-it came to me in full court press epiphany, what the breathtaking moral to her story had to be: The person who screams the loudest at having his Ba.s.s Weejuns befouled (or his Ox Weejuns gored; whichever comes first), is the clown who's been besmirching yours for as far back as you can remember.

Which leads me to the controversial subject of the colorization of old movies, a topic much in the news these days, a burning topic that has film directors foaming at the mouth. So crazyfying is this new technological gimmick to the fratority of auteurs that on November 12th, when Ted Turner's SuperStation, WTBS in Atlanta, premiered the first showing of the "computer colorized" version of The Maltese Falcon, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) shlepped out the film's writer-director, John Huston, fitted with nose-breathing apparatus to alleviate his serious emphysema, for a press conference. All across America-and by satellite, one presumes, to the rest of the world-particularly to France where cineastes look on this "advance" with the sort of approbation usually reserved for Quisling, Himmler and the Vichy government-the great John Huston could be seen on news broadcasts, referring to those who had altered his 1941 cla.s.sic as pimps, thugs and molesters of children. The old man was not happy; and if Ted Turner ever gives a d.a.m.n about any public opinion of his shenanigans, this little brouhaha bids fair to be the one that will give him the greatest pause.

(Let me interject that I am convinced that Turner, one of Forbes magazine's 400 wealthiest Americans, the kilowattage of whose hubris could light the entire length of the Autobahn for the rest of the century, a man given to invoking the name of G.o.d when he needs moral justification for one of his frequent unfriendly corporate takeover forays, cares as much about negative public opinion as a yeti does about a U-2 flyover.) There sat the old man (himself once the cinematic voice of G.o.d), as bucolic-looking as Gregory Peck in To Kill a Mockingbird or Jimmy Stewart in Anatomy of a Murder, and he told us that Color Systems Technology, one of the two hi-tech film-painting companies responsible for the tinting of such perennials as Yankee Doodle Dandy, Topper, Way Out West and Miracle on 34th Street, had savaged a great example of film as High Art, a movie designed to be shot in black and white, to be seen in black and white, to be preserved for all time and all film lovers in black and white.

I did not disagree with his outrage, nor with his aesthetic judgments, nor with his pa.s.sion. And if anyone has a right to an opinion on this matter, it is Huston. He not only directed The Maltese Falcon, he also wrote it.

No disagreement with Huston on Hammett's famous novel into film. Anyone who has ever seen it knows just how good American movies can be when they're done by men and women who combine talent and technique with high ethical behavior.

The Maltese Falcon, as ordered up by Turner in response to surveys that told him a generation of Porky's-lovers won't stay tv-tuned to films in black and white, has all the filmic design order one finds in a Cobb salad. It looks like s.h.i.t.

(And here's another nail for the coffin being readied for me by those who say I'm an Elitist. Who gives a d.a.m.n if Turner's surveys are right?!) To h.e.l.l with anyone loutish enough to need color to keep their minimal attention-span fixed through the commercials. Casablanca (which is supposed to be next on the paint-by-numbers. .h.i.t list) and Treasure of the Sierra Madre and His Girl Friday and It Happened One Night were designed and art-directed for black and white. They have a unified look that is turned to spinach by colorization. Anyone loutish enough not to perceive that ought to be nailed to a movie seat and forced to watch endless reruns of Top Gun or Monsignor. And to h.e.l.l with them.

So with agreement this strong, why was it that when Nicholas Meyer, a member of DGA and also one who sits on the Board of Directors of WGAw with me, solicited our vote in aid of condemning the colorization process, I spoke against the motion? Though I finally joined in with my brother and sister writers on the Board, supporting the denunciation with a unanimous vote, why was it that I raged against Nick's request in words and decibel-count usually expended on producers who seek to circ.u.mvent the terms of our Minimum Basic Agreement? How is it that one who shudders at a Bogart as Sam Spade with a head that glows pessary pink as if he had spent the night in a cyclotron, can argue against a motion that condemns the atrocious technique? And why is it that when we took a dinner break at that Board meeting, half a dozen other writers thanked me for what I'd said?

Surely it was because for the greater part of my, and their, lives we have been privileged to work at the n.o.blest craft the human race ever devised. The job of writing.

What I said, unleashing an anger that has not abated in almost twenty-five years of working in film and television, is that I found it both ironic and insulting that directors-who have butchered, altered, emasculated, corrupted, revised and once in a while by chance even bettered the work of writers to suit their own egos or artistic visions, to appease and suck up to the even more gargantuan ego of actors, to toady to creatively-tone-deaf producers, to avoid accusations of being politically incorrect, to latch onto trends at the cost of story integrity, to warp the whole in deference to some current special effects technique, and nine times out of ten without asking the creator whether s/he approved of the hatchet job-have the gall, the temerity, the chutzpah, to ask writers to support their bleat of pain when their vaunted artistic vision has been savaged! f.u.c.k us over for fifty years . . . and then come smiling the smile of the crocodile, seeking solidarity against the ravening minions of commercial transience. Announce to the world and Cahiers du Cinema that they, the visionaries, the effectuators, the cathexians, are in fact the creators of the cinematic work, the auteurs, whole and lambently perfect in their overviewing wisdom; that the script is merely the "floor plan," the "blueprint," the rough materials from which they, in their photomontagic G.o.dhood, fashion the dreams that enn.o.ble. Alter, for fifty years, what they wish, without regard to the primacy of interest of the writer who dreamed the dream in the first place; recast the role written for Sidney Greenstreet, to be played by Sammy Davis, Jr. in the more correct view of the G.o.d-Director; decide the linchpin speech of the protagonist, in which his entire character is limned, is unnecessary, is more "cinematic" encapsulated in a zoom shot into the narrowing eyes; put on the possessive credit before the t.i.tle even if it was an original screenplay; go on Entertainment Tonight and describe how s/he and the lead players worked out the real story, rewriting all that awful dialogue on the set as they went along; exclude the writer from the rehearsals and make him/her chilly unwelcome on the set; do all that and more . . . and then come like Hansel or Gretel seeking bread crumbs to aid them in their trek through the nasty forest. Does this come down to a matter of personal pique? You'd d.a.m.ned well better believe it. Personal pique filtered through me by fifty and more years of honest writers and wage hacks, mad geniuses and simple craftspersons, great novelists taking a fling in films and kids who grew up with television wanting only to write movies. Pique channeled through me for all the uncountable hours of personal abuse, degradation, threats, arbitrary alterations, canceled contracts, lawsuits and lies told to the press and producers that it was because the writer did such a s.h.i.tty job that the film was a dog, and that it was only because of heroic efforts of the flawless director that anything was salvaged! I speak here, and I spoke at that WGAw Board of Directors meeting for every writer who cried and tore hair and raged in the privacy of his or her home when s/he was taken off a film because s/he wouldn't knuckle under to the moronic demands of businessmen, conveyed through the director-posing-as-creator!

(Let me digress for a second. Not really a digression, but a statement about Nick Meyer.

(Nicholas Meyer is a writer of considerable distinction. A novelist and a scenarist whose body of work thus far commends him to the attention of anyone who thinks film is a serious art-form. As a director of such films as The Day After, Time After Time, The Seven Percent Solution and the second Star Trek movie, Nick has demonstrated both a wide eye and a keen sense in presenting material with rich subtexts. If I have differences with him on several of these films, they are based on glitches that are wholly my own, and which need not concern him, or you, ever.

(I'm not a friend of Nick Meyer's, and I'm definitely not an enemy of Nick Meyer. We are friendly acquaintances who have shared attendance at one dinner party, a number of evenings of WGAw Board meetings, some casual encounters at public functions, and similar political positions. From what I can tell, he's a good guy, and an honest man. I've already said I consider him a talented man. That I spoke against Nick's appeal at that meeting, had nothing to do with him. He was only the messenger and, I fear, he was only the guy who happened to be standing in the tunnel when the shrapnel hit.

(I wish to make this distinction clear, for him, and for my readers. As one who holds dual union credentials, in the DGA and the WGAw, it was absolutely appropriate for Nick Meyer to be the one to carry the appeal to us. Let no reader make the mistake of thinking that my anger and pa.s.sion were intended as a manifestation of pique at Nick.) No one who loves movies, no one who believes this is a legitimate art-form, no one who honors the work of the known and unknown thousands who have labored on films good and bad and merely mediocre, can approve of the colorization practice. I had to make that WGAw vote unanimous. It was not only the right thing to do, it was the only thing to do.

When the computerized coloring concept was first announced, some years ago, I thought it was at least intriguing. When the first film to be so treated was released, a pastelized rendering of one of my all-time favorites, Topper, I bought it and viewed it. It was so-so. Nothing very good there-I knew d.a.m.ned well that George and Marion Kerby's Hispano-Suiza (or whatever it is) was creamy white, not the bilious yellow someone had decided it ought to be-but nothing much terribly bad, either. It looked amateurish; it looked hastily processed; it looked like a diversion, in much the way one looks on 3-D: mildly amusing, but not worth taking seriously.

When they colored Yankee Doodle Dandy, even with Jimmy Cagney's glowing pink head like a balloon about to detach itself from his body, I couldn't get too worked up: I'd always seen the black and white film in color in my head, anyway. And I sorta supposed that if they'd considered it at the time it was being made, they might well have opted to do it in Technicolor. Certainly, if there was ever a b&w film that cried for color it was Yankee Doodle Dandy.

But when Turner came away from his brief ownership of MGM with a film library of great memories, that he then culled for one hundred films to be laid in the line of the moving Crayola, I became distressed. And now we see The Maltese Falcon, and now we understand that there were films intended for the chiaroscuro of magisterial design unity; and we realize that what Turner and his techno-thugs are doing is the rape of an American art treasure.

Apart from the sinister and deeply disturbing copyright questions even now being considered by the general counsel of the Copyright Office, even apart from all the aesthetic revulsion we feel, there is the problem of the marketplace. With colored versions of these films being played on free TV and wending their way to cable or pay-tv, the audience for these films in their pristine state will dwindle. Kids simply have no sense of history, and as they have been steadily brainwashed to accept nothing but roast beef red and car crashes, what will be the inducement for them to pay out money to go to the few art revival houses left in this country, to see a black and white version of, say, Casablanca, which they get for free on the little box and which they know oughtta be in color?

When I tell people that I still use a manual typewriter, not even an electric, much less a word-processor, they look at me as if I'm the king of the Luddites. Yet, it seems only sane and rational to me, that one adopts the level of technology that most conveniently permits one to produce the work at the highest level of craft, and eschews anything beyond that as merely playing with a new toy. I suppose that's the core of my objection to colorization. We don't really need it. The universe doesn't really need an aquatint rendering of those stark vistas and black and white emotions we know by heart from Treasure of the Sierra Madre. We do continue to need the arrangement of shadows out of which Bogart steps in The Maltese Falcon.

It's like going to see a club act in which a whistling dog performs "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Once, it's interesting; more than once it's merely a curiosity. That has very little, if anything, to do with art. And pandering to the corrupted tastes of a generation of kids for whom movies are nothing more than a prelude to getting laid, is loathsome in every way.

None of the foregoing withstanding, when Nick Meyer came to the Board and said, rally 'round the flag, boys and girls, even feeling as I do about this matter, my instant reaction was: big f.u.c.kin' deal! Now you're unhappy. Now you know how it feels. Too d.a.m.ned bad, directors. You are the ones who've done it to us with impunity forever, and now you squeal like pigs that they're doing it to you!

The Philistines have invaded your holy environs and you don't like it. But that won't stop you from continuing to do it to us. Because with the power to change, comes the power to demand more money, and artistic control, and devil take the hindmost . . . which has traditionally been the writers.

Whether the directors win this one, or lose this one, they've made the Writers Guild their bedfellow; but if there is even one writer out there who thinks that s/he can see the hideous parallel, who thinks that this will bring forth a wellspring of compa.s.sion for those of us who labor at the words before they ever see the project, then I submit that the writer ain't living in the same arena the rest: of us know.

The directors are having their ox gored by a man even more ruthless, even cra.s.ser than they. And dem widdle folkses doesn't wuv it even a widdle. To which reaction I fear I can display very little compa.s.sion. Good, I say! Good, you fat-a.s.sed bunch of self-anointed Michelangelos. Suffer, mudderfuggers! Get just a tiny taste of the bile we have to swallow every day, on every job, in Hollywood.

You got us to go along with you this time, because it is a terrible thing. For directors, for writers, for film lovers of all times and all places.

But do try to remember why you felt so badly, and how it felt, during this first, brief moment of your inconvenience. Because it is what lies at the heart of why so many of us hate so many of you.

Color you blue right now. Color us crimson always.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/April 1987 INSTALLMENT 23:.

In Which Premonitions Of The Future Lie In Wait To Swallow Shadows Of The Past

I'm at 30,000 feet aboard United flight 104, on my way to speak at a seminar on the creation of the universe (about which, you may be certain, I know even less than you) in company with Sir Fred Hoyle and Robert Jastrow at the University of Rochester; and as fear of making a total buffoon of myself has rendered me tabula rasa on the subject, precluding preparation of salient remarks, my mind is ratlike scurrying toward anything but the creation of the universe, so whattheh.e.l.l, why don't I write this overdue column instead; and most of all I'm thinking, mostly, about my friend Walter Koenig who is not speaking to me at the moment.

My friend Walter is a writer of screenplays, a fine teacher of acting, a collector of Big Little Books, and an actor who, for twenty years, has a.s.sayed the role of Ensign (now Lt.-Commander) Chekov on a television series, and in a quartet of motion pictures, generically known as Star Trek. A series and films with which many of you may be familiar. (I say may be familiar because, of late, things have gotten even worse than I'd imagined them to be, cultural memorywise. I mentioned all-chocolate Necco Wafers to a bunch of people in their early twenties the other day, and they looked at me blankly. That, added to the fact that on my Hour 25 radio show, during an interview with the talented artist Phil Foglio, he admitted he'd heard the phrase "civil rights" but didn't really know what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 alluded to, has given me pause. Thus have the Sixties and their history been flensed from the world in the minds of those under forty. So I take nothing for granted any more.) Now Walter being p.i.s.sed at me may not, at first blush, seem to be fit fodder for philippic, but the reason he's p.i.s.sed at me, the shadowy philosophical subtext of our minor contretemps, ties in with a few random thoughts about the new film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (Paramount), which Walter arranged for me to see a few weeks ago, as I fly overhead writing this.

A momentary pause. A short while ago I promised you a long column a.n.a.lyzing and praising the films that David Cronenberg has directed. I'm working on it. Mr. Cronenberg has made available to me ca.s.settes of his earliest, most-difficult-to-Iocate films (Stereo, made when he was 26 years old; Crimes of the Future from 1970; The Parasite Murders-which you may know either as Shivers or They Came from Within-and the uncut version of The Brood), and I am going at this essay with care and measured reason. It will be along shortly. Last time I ventured some thoughts on the coloring of films. Since that column-which has caused some small stir in the film community, including a spirited essay of response even before my column saw print, from screenwriter/director Nicholas Meyer, in the L.A. Times-I have learned of even more horrifying technology about to be brought to bear on cla.s.sic films now in the clutches of Ted Turner, and I am ama.s.sing data on same with director Joe Dante, in preparation for a follow-up column. That one should blow your socks off, and I expect if all goes well it will be my next installment. I haven't lost my place, as you might have suspicioned: I am simply trying to develop a sense of punctiliousness in my declining years. I tell you this to forestall kvetching.

So Walter isn't speaking to me.

That isn't unusual. Since the evening in 1963 when I met Walter on the Universal Studios backlot "New York street" where the Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k Hour was filming my "Memo from Purgatory" teleplay, he has sent me to Coventry many times, occasionally even for just cause. I am not permitted to get angry with Walter, that isn't in the contract; so I am not p.i.s.sed at Walter; but since I don't deserve his animus this time, I have decided to wait until he apologizes for being such a p.o.o.p. Nonetheless, the circ.u.mstances by which this crankiness developed, and the subtext which is more than slightly intriguing, prove germane to a theory about Star Trek that I've worked out exhaustively since I first thought of it way back, oh an hour ago, will this flight never end?!?

Presumably because I asked for $500,000 to write the screenplay of Star Trek IV when I met with Leonard Nimoy and Harve Bennett on Friday, January 25th, 1985-on the grounds that if I had to write for Shatner, if I had to write in a part for Eddie Murphy, if I would have to face the imbroglio of others wanting to share screen credit with me, if I was going to have to put up with the tsuriss I knew would be attendant on any involvement with Paramount and its peculiar att.i.tude toward the Star Trek films, I would have to be compensated in heavy balance-a demand that was greeted first with disbelief, then consternation, then with disdain, and finally with utter rejection (as sane a decision as ever Paramount made), I was never invited to a prerelease screening of the movie.

I mentioned having been "overlooked" during a conversation with Walter, and he thereafter broke his hump getting me comped into the Cinerama Dome. Not an easy thing to do.

A day or so later, when I called Walter to thank him for his efforts, I made some casual remarks about my reaction to the film-which were positive-not foamingly laudatory, but positive, about which more in a moment-but the main reason I'd called was to urge him to get into the queue for script a.s.signments on the newly-proposed return of Star Trek as a television series for syndication, with an all-new cast. We talked about that for a few minutes and then, with an edge in his voice, Walter said, "Okay, so what did you think of my performance?"

For an instant I was thrown off-balance. The subject had been changed without warning. And I answered quickly, with what I consider honesty and candor, "It was fine. I said I thought it was the best ensemble work from the regulars that I'd seen in any of the four films, remember? They didn't give you quite as much to do in this one as they did in Star Trek II, but it was a lot more onscreen time than you got in the first or third films. And what you did, I liked. You know. You did Chekov, and you did him just fine."

Walter's anger was instant. "Don't break your back straining yourself!" I fumfuh'd, not understanding why he was so hot, and only made matters worse (apparently) by saying, "Come on, Walter, I'm not bulls.h.i.tting you. It was fine. I mean, they don't really give you Gielgud or Olivier material to play . . . what you were given you did very well, indeed." Which only raised his ire the more. And he snapped my head off that he was through discussing it, and I said we can talk about it more later, if you like, and Walter snarled, "Yeah, sure," or bit-off words to that effect, and he hung up on me; and we haven't talked since, which is a while ago; and I don't like having Walter p.i.s.sed at me, but there's not much I can do about it this time till he cools down and chooses to honor my honestly-delivered remarks.

Which would be, taken at face value, merely the recounting of an unfortunate misunderstanding between long-time chums, were it not that (upon reflection born of gloom) what I said to Walter emerges from a response to the totality of the Star Trek phenomenon. Which is, at last, the proper fodder for this column.

It is no secret that for many years I was not exactly the biggest booster of ST. Having been in at the beginning before the beginning of the series, having been one of the first writers hired to write the show, I was wildly enthusiastic about the series as Gene Roddenberry had initially conceived it. (In fact, at the very first Nebula Awards banquet of the Science Fiction Writers of America, which I set up at the Tail O' The c.o.c.k here in Los Angeles, I arranged for a pre-debut screening of the pilot segment.) The show debuted on September 8th, 1966 and by December it was in trouble with NBC. The Nielsens were very low, and Gene asked me if there was anything I could do to get the popularity the show was experiencing in science fiction circles conveyed to the network. I set up "The Committee" and using the facilities of Desilu Studios, I sent out five thousand letters of appeal to fandom, urging the viewers to inundate NBC with demands that the show be kept on the air. (The original of that letter, seen here for the first time in print, is reproduced as a sidebar courtesy of The n.o.ble Ferman Editors.) And so it was with heavy heart that I fell away, as it were. I had my th.o.r.n.y problems with Gene over "The City on the Edge of Forever," about which I've written elsewhere; and after my segment aired I divorced myself from ST with a pa.s.sion that frequently slopped over into meanspiritedness. When the first film came out in 1979, I wrote a long and bruising review that resulted in fannish animus up to and well past the egging of my home. This, despite the fact that by now everyone agrees Star Trek-The Motion Picture was a dismal piece of business.

I was not much more impressed with ST as the subject for full-length features when ST II was released in 1982, chiefly because Paramount thought it could amortize some of the sets and recoup their losses on the first flick. Or if not losses, at least make a few bucks on the residue.

The Search for Spock in 1984 seemed to me a decent piece of work, and I said so in print. But by that time ST had already been an animated cartoon series, and the original shows were a vast moneymaking machine for Paramount in syndication. Not to mention videoca.s.settes, which sold steadily and well.

Now comes the fourth feature-length outing of the crew of the NCC-1701, and it is far and away the best of the bunch, a film that capitalizes on what the series did best when it was at the peak of its limited form. It is a film about the crew, who have become family for millions of people around the world, and it is filled with humanity, with caring, and with simple, uncomplicated elements of decency and responsibility. It eschews almost all of the jiggery-pokery of abstruse theology, gimcrack hardware, imbecile s.p.a.ce battles and embarra.s.singly soph.o.m.oric "message" philosophy to present an uncomplicated story of the clock ticking down to doom while decent people struggle to find a timely and humane solution.

THE COMMITTEE.

Foul Anderson * Robert Bloch * Lester del Rey * Harlan Ellison Philip Jose Farmer * Frank Herbert * Richard Matheson Theodore Sturgeon * A. E. Van Vogt Dear __________, It's finally happened. You've been in the know for a long time, you've known the worth of mature science fiction, and you've squirmed at the adolescent manner with which it has generally been presented on television. Now, finally, we've lucked-out, we've gotten a show on prime time that is attempting to do the missionary job for the field of speculative fiction. The show is STAR TREK, of course, and its aims have been lofty. STAR TREK has been carrying the good word out to the boondocks. Those who have seen the show know it is frequently written by authentic science fiction writers, it is made with enormous difficulty and with considerable pride. If you were at the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland you know it received standing ovations and was awarded a special citation by the Convention. STAR TREK has finally showed the ma.s.s audience that science fiction need not be situation comedy in s.p.a.ce suits. The reason for this letter-and frankly, its appeal for help-is that we've learned this show, despite its healthy growth, could face trouble soon. The Nielsen Roulette game is being played. They say, "If mature science fiction is so hot, howzacome that kiddie s.p.a.ce show on the other network is doing so much better?" There is no sense explaining it's the second year for the compet.i.tion and the first year for STAR TREK; all they understand are the decimal places. And the sound of voices raised. Which is where you come in.

STAR TREK's cancellation or a change to a less adult format would be tragic, seeming to demonstrate that real science fiction cannot attract a ma.s.s audience.

We need letters! Yours and ours, plus every science fiction fan and TV viewer we can reach through our publications and personal contacts. Important: Not form letters, not using our phrases here; They should be the fan's own words and honest att.i.tudes. They should go to: (a) local television stations which carry STAR TREK; (b) to sponsors who advertise on STAR TREK; (c) local and syndicated television columnists; and (d) TV GUIDE and other television magazines.

The situation is critical; it has to happen now or it will be too late. We're giving it all our efforts; we hope we can count on yours.

Sincerely,

Harlan Ellison Committee

December 1,1966

While I have my Writers Guild of America member reservations about the propriety of a solo credit that reads A LEONARD NIMOY FILM for the man's second directorial outing, and while I still see the hideous thumbprint of Bill Shatner's demand for more and more domination of scene after scene, I recommend this film to those few of you who may have missed it. It is a good movie, and the best presentation yet of all of the regular cast members-except for Nich.e.l.le and George, who caught the short end of the script this time-and is, at last, a ST venture at full length that no one who loves movies can carp about.

But as the film does well in theaters, and as the new series is prepared for nationwide syndication, as the fast-food joints market their ST gla.s.ses and the K-Marts hawk their ST lunch boxes, we must recognize that a miracle has been pa.s.sed.

Star Trek has, at last, become more than an underground fetish; it has surpa.s.sed the mingy goal of networks and studios for a five-season run; it has gone beyond an addiction that needs a filmic fix every two or three years; it is larger than just a tv/movie staple, like the boring James Bond things that come to us as regularly as summer colds. It has absorbed its own legend and hewn a niche in posterity against all odds.

The series had serious flaws, taken as a whole. The studio and the network were never comfortable with it, and did little to preserve it. The first two films were, at best, cannon fodder. Its greatest strength, the seven or eight fine actors who comprise the crew of the Enterprise-with the exceptions, of course, of Shatner and Nimoy-have been used badly and treated on too many occasions as spear-carriers for name guest actors or special effects trickery. The pandering to trekkies, trekists, trekkers and trekoids has been shameless, to the detriment of chance-taking and plots that ventured farther afield.

Despite all that, Star Trek has held on. It has clawed its way out of the genre category to become a universal part of the American cultural scene. And Star Trek IV (about whose plot I need say nothing, for you have either seen it and know it, or haven't seen it and don't need to spoil it) is the first light on ST's road into the future. Star Trek is now a given. It has swallowed the inadequacies of its past, and now can do no wrong. The new series, and however many full-length films there may be, are now a.s.sured of an unstinting affection usually reserved for Lindberghs or Rutans & Yeagers. It is a seamless whole, a household word, the speaking of whose t.i.tle conjures memories and an all-encompa.s.sing warmth for several generations who have grown up with these s.p.a.ce adventurers. Like Tarzan and Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes, like Mickey Mouse and Superman and Hamlet, they are forever. Or as close to forever as a nation rushing toward total illiteracy can proffer.

Thus, when Walter asked me how he had performed in this latest icon of the legend, my response was as de facto as that of the ballerina in The Red Shoes who, when asked by the impresario, "Why must you dance?" replied almost without thinking, "Why must you breathe?"

I am guilty of forgetting that Walter is, among his many other personas, an actor. And actors need to hear if they did the acting well or badly. I am guilty of thinking (for the first time, and without recognizing the shift in my own perceptions) of Chekov as part of a gestalt, and a gestalt that worked so wonderfully well for me, for the first time, that I overlooked Walter's need as a human being to be singled out.

I am guilty of consigning Walter Koenig to the seamless oneness of the Star Trek mythos. If a brick had asked me how well it had performed as a brick, I would have said, "Your wall holds up the roof splendidly." That is at once enn.o.bling him and demeaning him. But until I said it, and until I worried the repercussions of having said it, I did not understand that the miracle had been pa.s.sed, and that Star Trek had become something about which ordinary criticism could not be ventured, at risk of being beside-the-point or redundant.

Like the politician whose n.o.bility in high office blots out all the picayune malfeasances on the way to invest.i.ture as icon, ST has eaten its past and has lit its way into the annals of Art that is beyond Entertainment.

That I find myself saying all this, after more than twenty years, surprises me as much as you.

Now if Koenig will just lighten up, perhaps I can concentrate on the creation of the universe, and other less knotty problems, such as when the h.e.l.l will this d.a.m.ned jet land!?!

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / May 1987 INSTALLMENT 24:.

In Which Flora And Fauna Come To A Last Minute Rescue, Thereby Preventing The Forlorn From Handing It All Over To The c.o.c.kroaches