Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 25

In Which The LI'l White Lies Thesis (Part Two) Takes Us By The Snout And Drags Us Unwillingly Toward A Door We Fear To Open

We were talking about being lied to, and how it unhinges us. How it makes us feel used and foolish, that we were so d.a.m.ned anxious to believe the hype. How irrationally angry it makes us to know that no matter how wise and experienced we have become as we grew older, that adroit liars can still manipulate us by plumbing our ever-regenerating gullibility, our need to believe. (In this way, I suspect, no amount of revelation of corruption on the part of televangelists will ever free their supporters. They discover one awfulness after another about the Falwells, Swaggarts, Popoffs, Robertsons and Bakkers, and yet they fling themselves again and again into the wash of hossanahs that keeps them asea in ignorance.) As Michel de Montaigne, the French moralist, wrote: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know."

We were talking about the false lures thrown out by the makers of movies to convince us that trash has sidebar merit, value apart from the work itself. And I mentioned that we had been lied to as regards, among other films, the 1985 fantasy Ladyhawke. And one of you wrote insisting that I was wrong, that the film was based on some obscure medieval legends. And Faithful Reader upbraided me for mischievously shattering beliefs.

Well, I never went into detail on that matter, because I'm trying (in what now appears to be a series of three columns) to codify a thesis of gullibility and duplicity that seems to have some credibility; and I simply didn't have the time to linger. But perhaps you do need a bit more convincing.

In the September/October 1987 issue of Scannings, an information search and retrieval newsletter for librarians, we find the following Q&A exchange: Q: On what legends was the movie "Ladyhawke" based? The story concerns lovers who are cursed. He is a wolf at night, she a hawk during the day. They a.s.sume their human forms only at opposite times.

A: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library had a press release from Warner Bros, stating, "legend dates back to the 13th century from paintings on the walls of the Mauseturm Castle in the Rhine Valley to the Loup Garou legend of France's Auvergne Forest to Rodriguez de la Fuente in Spain."

When we went to gather these legends . . . we found the Mauseturm story did not match, the loup-garou, or werewolf, story was too vague, and the only Rodriguez de la Fuente we found was a 20th century Spanish naturalist.

We wrote to scriptwriter Edward Khmara for an explanation. Here is his reply: The story of two lovers kept apart by taking human form only at opposite times of the day was an inspiration that occurred to me while jogging on the roof of the Hollywood YMCA.

The studio contention that "Ladyhawke" is based on an old legend is, in fact, a violation of Writers Guild rules, since it denies me full rights of authorship. The Guild undertook an action against Warner Bros, on this account . . . and a small amount of money was paid as compensation . . . Warner Bros., or its publicity department, continues to circulate material restating the old legend story.

The inspiration for the character of Phillipe the Mouse was Francois Villon. His "Testament" recounts his imprisonment and mistreatment by Bishop Thibault d'Aussigny, in the dungeons of Meung. When the Dauphin, soon to be Louis XI of France, pa.s.sed through Meung on the way to his coronation, he freed the prisoners, including Villon. This incident was actually used in the original story of "Ladyhawke."

So I may have been wrong about the meaning of "liver and lights," but I definitely knew what I was talking about when I used Ladyhawke as an example of how we are lied to.

Lied to, that is, in the specific sense of misrepresentation. And here, as I promised in Installment 29, we'll move on to another kind of lying, another species of misrepresentation: plagiarism.

If one elects to pursue a plagiarism suit in a court of law, one must never solicit "expert testimony" from a Renaissance or Medieval scholar, because stealing the work, ideas, manner of others, in those times, was considered nothing unusual. In fact, quite acceptable.

The modern concept of plagiarism, paradoxically, is both specific and nebulous. What is theft, and what is "coincidental simultaneous generation" of idea or ambience? What is the rapacity of producers, network development executives, main chance hustlers and all those who denigrate writers but don't know how to construct a plot themselves . . . and what is acceptable, even flattering, literary crossover, feedback, input, stimulation?

In the world of publishing, plagiarism is so rare that its occurrence startles everyone, and it makes the news section of Publishers Weekly.

(Oddly enough-given the almost encyclopedic memories of so many readers and writers and fans, guaranteeing near-instantaneous unmasking-there have been a few notable instances of book/story plagiarism in the sf/fantasy genre in recent memory. There was a guy who took Gardner F. Fox's 1964 Paperback Library novel, Escape Across the Cosmos, changed the names of the characters, and sold it to another paperback house some years later. There is considerable mythology surrounding that most flagrant case, and while I'm certain some readers will know the specifics, the best I can do is present all the data I can dredge up from imperfect memories, both actual and emblematic. Trying to get the anecdote accurately, I savaged the recollections of Charlie Brown of Locus, Silverberg, Joe Haldeman and several others, but understandably enough none of these rational gentlemen cared to depart from their creative labors to spend several hours rummaging through ancient issues of the SFWA Forum or other sources to get me the data. You've got to be kidding and p.i.s.s off, kid were the politest responses. Can't say I blame 'em; so you'll have to do with this jumble of truths and fancies intended to make the point, not to reflect what actually happened. Anyhow, one story has it that a customer came into a specialty bookshop bearing a copy of a paperback bought the day before, screaming scorched earth at the bookseller for having sold the outraged reader a novel that was exactly like one the customer had read. When the bookseller compared the new t.i.tle with the Fox book, it was discovered that the theft was line-for-line. The author had copied the entire novel, merely changing the names of the characters. When the bookseller advised the publisher-some say it was Belmont, a well-known schlock operation, thus making this a cla.s.sic case of poetic justice-the publisher sought out the writer and discovered he was hard at work doing the same job on an old Robert Moore Williams Ace double. When confronted with his crime, the guy is alleged to have been utterly bewildered. "I didn't do anything wrong," he's reported to have said. "Isn't this the way all books are written?" If that part isn't whole cloth, then it was a case of doltish behavior raised to the nth power. But other versions of the yarn have it that the guy also sold the Fox novel a second time, to the hardcover publisher Thomas Nelson, having changed the names again. And when they went looking for the clown, he'd cashed the check and split. Either way, it doesn't speak well to the familiarity-with-genre of the editors involved. Usually, this kind of thing is the result of uncomplicated amateurism, a lack of commonsense, naivete almost impossible to conceive if one has even a pa.s.sing familiarity with writing and publishing. Impossible for us to believe, yet far more common than one might suspect. But once in a while the plagiarism comes from a professional who does know better, who does the deed fully cognizant of what s/he is pulling off. In 1974 a well-known fantasy author-whose ident.i.ty, though known to me, has never been publicly revealed, nor will I do so now-masquerading as "Terry Dixon," supposedly a young black male writer, copped the famous Anatole France short story, "The Procurator of Judrea," rewrote it as "The Prophet of Zorayne," and pa.s.sed it off for sale to Roger Elwood for a Trident Press/Pocket Books anthology. A private detective named Sam Bluth was hired to track down the culprit, and the writer-neither young nor black-was brought to book. A rare, bizarre case.) But if the foregoing produce hilo because of their rarity, not even a hiccup is produced by the daily thefts in the worlds of television and motion pictures. It is so common, this thuggish misappropriation of other's stories-both produced and in raw ma.n.u.script form-that when Ben Bova and I won our plagiarism suit against ABC-TV and Paramount in 1980, both the media and industry were astonished that someone had actually pursued such a pilferage beyond the pro forma out-of-court, keep-your-mouth-shut, take-the-money-and-scamper cash settlement (SCI-FI WRITERS WIN $337,000 IN PLAGIARISM SUIT! said the front page of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner with a word-choice that made my toenails ache).

It is no less than inst.i.tutionalized behavior; no more needful of exculpation, in the larcenous souls of these dandiprats, than is the gnawing of long pig off a femur in the view of a cannibal. How to explain it . . . in terms a rational, ethical human being can comprehend . . . this singularly irrational and unethical behavior . . . how to explain it . . .

Perhaps this: I have written the anecdote elsewhere, but I cannot remember just where. Don't stop me if you've heard this one before, I'm on a roll.

Two hundred thousand years ago, when I was youngish in the movie business, I was called in to the offices of a producer who had been on the Paramount lot forever. He made B films. Still does. Saw him on Entertainment Tonight just a few weeks ago. Must be older than Angkor Wat. You'd recognize the name. Anyway. He sat me down, and he ran the de rigueur chat, and then he puffed up and spread his petals like the Rafflesia microbilorum* and he told me he had the most sensational idea for a science fiction monster movie since Santa Claus conquered the Martians, and he wanted widdle ole me to write it. There was one of these at the end of his pitch:!

*A stemless, leafless, parasitic plant of the genus Rafflesia, named after Sir T. Stamford Raffles, British East Indian administrator and founder (1819) of Singapore, who was largely responsible for the creation of Britain's Far Eastern empire; in honor of his discovery of this plant order during the period of his governorship of Java. The microbilorum is the largest-known rafflesiaceous plant of the genus, weighing 37 lbs. and a yard wide. Indigenous to the Malay Peninsula, it was first identified in central Sumatra by naturalist Arnold Newman, who reports that it takes the bud three years to develop, then it springs open in an instant with the hiss of a striking cobra. Open, it smells like rotten meat.

"Delight me," I said, all aglow at the prospect of hearing a basic concept so effulgent in its fecundity that it would knock me a.s.s over teakettle. And he grinned hugely, and he said: "Ta h.e.l.l with all the giant ant movies, and the giant spider movies, and the giant leech movies! I already have the studio backing to produce the first giant locust movie!"

A stemless, leafless, parasitic plant of the genus Rafflesia, named after Sir T. Stamford Raffles, British East Indian administrator and founder (1819) of Singapore, who was largely responsible for the creation of Britain's Far Eastern empire; in honor of his discovery of this plant order during the period of his governorship of Java. The microbilorum is the largest-known rafflesiaceous plant of the genus, weighing 37 lbs. and a yard wide. Indigenous to the Malay Peninsula, it was first identified in central Sumatra by naturalist Arnold Newman, who reports that it takes the bud three years to develop, then it springs open in an instant with the hiss of a striking cobra. Open, it smells like rotten meat.

We then began, in those pre-Maddie&David days, to do Moonlighting stichomythia: "No," I said.

"No?" he said.

"No."

"What, no?"

"No, not possible."

"What, not possible?"

"Me writing such a dumb."

"It's dumb?"

"It is cataclysmically dumb."

"Why, dumb?"

"Look," I said, speaking slowly and making sure he was watching my lips, "there is this absolutely ironclad, irrevocable, no way to get around, under, over or through it rule in physics. It is called . . . " and I cut in the echo chamber effect to make sure he knew this was Big Stuff, " . . . THE SQUARE CUBE LAWahwahwahwah . . . "

"Square Cube Law." He repeated it. Then again.

"That's right. The Square Cube Law. And you know what the Square Cube Law of physics, that is the law of the universe, says?"

"What does it say?"

"It says that if you increase the size by squaring it, you cube the weight. Now. Do you know what that means in practical terms?"

"No, I don't know what that means."

"It means that if, say, you take the largest ant known, which is maybe a quarter of an inch long, and you blow it up a thousand times, which would make it something over twenty feet high . . . would that be a big enough ant for you . . . ?"

"Locust."

"Okay! Locust, fer chrissakes! Pretend the G.o.ddam locust is a quarter inch long and you make it a thousand times bigger. Is that a big enough locust for you?"

"Could it be sixty feet?"

"Please! Settle for twenty, just for the sake of discussion."

"Okay, for this talk, twenty. But if we're gonna have a special effect that looks terrific on the screen, it really should be at least sixt-" He could see my eyes were rolling, and little bits of foam were flecking the corners of my mouth, so he hastily placated me.

"Twenty is okay. Twenty is good."

"Right. So now we have a twenty-foot-high locust. We have increased the size by a thousand times. But the Square Cube Law says the weight isn't merely squared, it's cubed . . . that means three times three times three . . . okay?"

"If you say so."

"I say so. The f.u.c.kin' Law says so! Which means the weight has been increased not a thousand times, but a million times. And since the ant or the locust or the katydid or whatevertheh.e.l.l it is, is only made out of balsa wood and crepe paper and held together by flour-and-water paste or maybe the bug world equivalent of Elmer's Glue, the whole d.a.m.ned thing won't be able to support its own weight, and it will come crashing down like the second week's receipts on a Jerry Lewis movie. Got it?"

"Uh."

"Okay. Let me quote to you from a great scientist, scholar, philosopher and very wealthy man (I threw in that last to get his attention) named L. Sprague de Camp. He said, simply, 'Every time you double the insect's dimensions, you increase its strength and the area of its breathing pa.s.sages by four, but you multiply its ma.s.s by eight, so you can't enlarge him much before he can no longer move or breathe."

"Oooooh."

"Yeah. Oh. So you see, it's a dumb idea that won't work, even though a lot of dumb movies have been made that way, which was okay when people were stupid and believed the Earth was flat and you could sail over the edge, but not today when every kid wants to be an astronaut."

So he thought about that for a few minutes, in silence. And then he brightened. He said, "So okay, I take your point. That's why I called you in. You're smart about this kind of stuff." (Little did he know I had to call Silverberg to get him to explain the d.a.m.ned Square Cube Law to me.) "So if you don't like that idea, take anyone of those up there . . . " And he pointed to a chifforobe in the corner, atop which sat, mildewing under a patina of dust and silverfish droppings, a stack of old Ziff-Davis pulp magazines. Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Giant Insect Tales. "Go through 'em. Take any idea you like. We'll make that one!"

"Are you crazy?"

"What, crazy?"

"That's stealing! It's plagiarism!"

"Who'll know?"

"I'll know, you a.s.shole!"

"I don't have to listen to that kinda talk!"

"You're right," I said, rising. "You don't." And I left.

To this day, he doesn't realize he was suggesting something disreputable beyond the telling.

And that is the att.i.tude that prevails in Hollywood. Now do you understand?

There is, in these people, the imbrication of arrogance and stupidity that is as impenetrable to ethic as an armadillo's hide. If they chance upon a concept that manages to penetrate, and they can identify it with some film already made that did big box-office, and if it is not so different that when they pitch it, the similarity to the successful former film escapes the studio boss or the network honcho, they will offer it as their own. That it came from some other creative source does not enter into their thinking. We'll change it, it'll work, they say. And those to whom they are pitching are equally as ignorant of sources, so they enter unwittingly into the conspiracy to steal.

Which may or may not be what happened with The Running Man and The Hidden. But though we've drawn nearer to that door behind which lies a horror unspeakable, we will all have to wait till installment 31 for the conclusion of the thesis of Li'l White Lies. Which may not be a G.o.ddam LAW OF THE UNIVERSE but if it ain't, it oughtta be!

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / August 1988 INSTALLMENT 31:.

In Which The LI'l White Lies Thesis (Part Three) Approaches A Nascent State, Approaches The Dreadful Door, And En Route Questions Meat Idolatry

Being lied to. Selling inferior goods by duping us with a.s.sertions that said grubby goods have "phantom values" apart from what we see on the screen: The Emerald Forest supposedly based on a true story; Ladyhawke a retelling of medieval legends; Hangar 18 revealing suppressed Air Force knowledge of UFOs; lies, everyone of them. Lures, cynically dangled.

Being lied to. Promoting films of rape, violence, ethical debas.e.m.e.nt, moral turpitude, inhuman behavior, s.e.xism with prolonged graphic representations in adoring closeup, and then justifying it by wide-eyed explanation that "we show you this woman having an icepick driven into her eye to show you how much we disapprove of it." Exploitation, pandering to the debased nature of the contemporary audience, feeding the sickness. Rationalizing and justifying and excusing . . . with lies.

Being lied to. Using the ignorance of the audience against itself. Telling us that by coloring stylish black-and-white films like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, they offer them to a generation of young viewers who won't go to a movie if it isn't in color. Denying to that generation the experience of seeing such objets d'art as they were intended to be seen. Producing by such corruption of the audience a self-fulfilling prophecy, by which the ignorant are kept ignorant . . . in the sense of uneducated.

Being lied to. As we examined such misrepresentation last time, through the noxious practice of plagiarism. Parvenus and no-talents, rampant in the film industry, incapable of creating new dreams themselves, hungering for sinecures as directors and producers while condemning writers to the beanfield labor of actually doing the screenplay and then having it wrested from them so they can "reinterpret." Unabashedly stealing ideas and concepts and entire screenplays, recasting them in their own cliche-riddled manner, and sending them out to market, to an audience with either short memories or no memories. If you have seen the Clint Eastwood film Pale Rider and are not deeply infuriated at it . . . then you are the ignorant of whom I speak. And if you look bewildered at that: remark, and your att.i.tude turns rancid against he who points out that you are cerebrose in this matter, then I suggest you go and rent videoca.s.settes of that film and Shane. And if you do not perceive very quickly that Pale Rider is a shameless, awful ripoff of the A.B. Guthrie-Jack Sher adaptation of Jack Schaefer's exquisite novel (combined with a ripoff of the "ghost" element from the 1972 Eastwood vehicle High Plains Drifter, written by Ernest Tidyman), then you are dumber than I think. And you deserve no better than rudeness, because your ignorance only permits this evil to flourish.

So let us consider two recent films that mayor may not be ripoffs of famous science fiction stories. Two films that did extremely well at the box office, and have been lauded as fresh and original ideas by critics utterly unaware of the vast body of sf material that has been fueling the engines of film thieves for fifty years. Two films that take the basic ideas already existent in sf stories, simplify them, render them in much cruder form, and deny to the original authors the ability ever to have their work translated to the screen.

The first is The Running Man (Taft Entertainment/Keith Barish Productions) and the second is The Hidden (New Line Cinema).

In the Los Angeles Daily News of 13 November 87, a gentleman named Michael Healy, who is identified as "Daily News Film Critic," says this of The Running Man: "Schwarzenegger stumbles and falls flat in this futuristic satire on TV game shows with a plot lifted from Richard Connell's story 'The Most Dangerous Game.' Stephen King did the lifting under the name Richard Bachman, and Steven de Souza turned it all into a screenplay about as original as a speech by Joe Biden."

Close. Very close. And one must admire Mr. Healy for not only getting full writing credits into the first three paragraphs of his review-as opposed to most "film critics" who find it less of a strain on their limited intelligence to use the odious crush word "sci-fi" than to describe an individual film as what it is, without recourse to a demeaning neologism . . . and who ease that strain on their gray tapioca matter even more by pretending the director wrote the film, with never a scenarist credit to be found pa.s.sim the review, much less a reference to the original source material-but Healy draws our applause for additionally noting the historical precedent for the plot. A film critic who not only reads (New Miracles! New Miracles!) but who has a sense of literary ebb and flow. And he's close, very close.

Yes, the famous 1924 Connell short story (oft-refilmed) is certainly the master template for The Running Man, but it isn't the specific work pilfered. We come to Steven de Souza's ankyloglossial screenplay by way of the 1982 NAL paperback novel pseudonymously penned by Stephen King. And we come to Bachman's The Running Man by way of Robert Sheckley's famous short story "The Prize of Peril" (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1958). If you don't remember the yarn, go find it in Sheck's collections Store of Infinity, The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley, or anyone of several dozen anthologies in which it has been reprinted. It's about this guy who becomes an unwilling contestant on a nationally-obsessive tv program where you run and run and people try to kill you.

It was the story that sparked the campus fad some years back, for hunter/victim games in which students stalked each other and "killed" each other with paint-squibs from toy guns. Which fad, in turn, sparked a dreadful movie t.i.tled Gotcha!

When the Bachman book first appeared, it drew almost no attention, because no one knew it was Stephen behind the nom-de-plume. But when it came out, and prices for those four NAL throwaway adventure novels by "Bachman" went through the roof in antiquarian bookdealer catalogues that provide Colombian Gold-level fixes for King addicts, and NAL reissued the books in an omnibus volume, I received a call from Sheckley.

"Have you read The Running Man?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"Listen: I may be crazy," Sheck said, with considerable nervousness and more than a scintilla of reluctance to rush to judgment, "but do you see a lot of my story 'The Prize of Peril' in that book?"

I said, "Yes, I see it as being d.a.m.ned nearly the same plot, done at length."

A silence pa.s.sed between us. A long silence, in which each of us tried to find a way to speak the unspeakable, to approach that dreadful door behind which lay the necessity to think the unthinkable. Finally, Bob said: "Well, what do you think?"

And I said, very carefully, "I know Steve, and I know d.a.m.ned well he wouldn't steal. It's that simple. But Stephen has often said that he's been inspired by films and stories he's read years before, that slipped down into the back of his head. This might be one of those cases."

Again a silence. And at last Sheckley asked, very hesitantly, "Do you think I should do something about this?"

"I think you ought to talk to Stephen."

What lay in the subtext of our conversation was the dire possibility that something would have to be done. As one who has been compelled to pursue legal means to redress the sins of plagiarism committed against me by film companies and TV networks, I was careful not to put Sheckley in a state of paranoia about The Running Man. But talking to Stephen King seemed the correct way to go about it. Sheckley asked me if I'd call Steve and give him Bob's number, and ask if he'd call.

I said I would; I called Steve and we talked; and he said he remembered reading "The Prize of Peril" years and years before; and he a.s.sured me he'd call Sheckley to work it out.

That call transpired, and Sheckley later told me he was satisfied with King's open remarks. The sense I got from what Sheck said, was that Steve may well have dredged out of the mire of memory the basic plotline of "Prize of Peril," never remembering it as an actual reading experience but transforming it, as all writers do, into the self-generated conceit that was published as The Running Man.

The aphorist Olin Miller has said, "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory."

For those who have read Stephen King's The Tommyknockers and continue to endure the frisson of deja vu, I suggest you rent the videoca.s.sette of Five Million Years to Earth (1968). And when you compare them, understand that I do not in even the tiniest way suggest that Stephen King cops the work of other writers. Let me say that again, even stronger, so no one of even the most diminished capacity can read into my words the ugly intimation: Stephen King does not steal. He's too good to have to steal. But in the realm of sf/fantasy there are ideas that we rework and re-rework, recast and refashion, expand and transmogrify, that become common coin. James Blish was not the first writer to use the "enclosed universe" concept, but who would deny his reinterpretation of Bob Heinlein's "Universe" as the extraordinary "Surface Tension"? And if Heinlein was sparked to write The Puppet Masters after being enthralled by Wells's War of the Worlds, is there anyone idiot enough to suggest it was plagiarism?

No, literary crossover happens. And we are all enriched by it.

But "The Prize of Peril" is a richer way of telling the story at hand than The Running Man, especially as debased by Steven de Souza and Schwarzenegger. The lie we are fed, is the lie that The Running Man is a fresh, bold, new idea.

And if we look at The Hidden, from a screenplay by Robert Hunt, we can see the basic plot core of Hal Clement's famous novel of interplanetary cops-and-robbers, Needle. And we can see The Hidden ripped off for television as NBC's Something Is Out There, the pilot of which aired recently, with the promise that if there is a Fall Season, we'll be getting Hal Clement's Needle as a series written and produced by people who think Something Is Out There is only first-generation theft, when it all proceeds from Clement . . . who won't see a cent of the millions these arrivistes will rake in.

The lie we are told is that these watered-down, scientifically illiterate, mook-level ripoffs are the Real Thing. And that is why, in installment 30 of this column, I urged the Science Fiction Writers of America to reinstate the Dramatic Writing category in the Nebula awards. If sf writers don't move to quash the lie, then who will? And if the readers and writers in the genre don't come to their senses and stop accepting this inst.i.tutionalized theft, on which the lie floats blissfully, then those of you who praise dreck like The Running Man deserve no better than you get. Behind that dreadful door through which you, as innocent moviegoers, pa.s.s to nullify your reason with special effects and the idolatry of Schwarzeneggers and Stallones and Michael J. Foxes, lies the awful truth that the treasurehouse of ideas sf has filled since (at least) 1926, is being systematically looted by people who sneer at the concept of primacy of ownership of the creators.