Harlan Ellison's Watching Part 26

As coda to this essay, and to satisfy Brian Siano of Philadelphia, and the others who requested it, let me make my feelings known about Arnold Schwarzenegger, et al.

Somewhere in the commercially ongoing practice of (how shall I put this delicately) "Idolizing Meat" there is a nubbin of rationale that has always escaped me.

Idolizing Meat may have been started in 1917 when the silent film actor Otto Elmo Linkenhelter was ret.i.tled Elmo Lincoln, and cast as the first incarnation of Burroughs's lord of the jungle in Tarzan of the Apes . . . but there are very likely a dozen even earlier isometric idols that cine-historians can point out.

But thereafter, fer shoor, the film industry mentality has gifted us with one muscle bound matinee idol after another, from Victor Mature and Steve Reeves to the current batch of melon-smugglers-a curl of Cro-Magnons, perhaps?-whose thespic abilities seem to me best subsumed in the quote from Dorothy Parker, or Alexander Wollcott, or somebody swell like that, who commented that a certain actress had flung her talent the full range from A to B.

I speak now of the cinematic lineal descendants of Johnny Weismuller, Buster Crabbe, and Gordon Scott: the vacuous Miles O'Keeffe, the anthracitelike Dolph Lundgren, the spectacularly untalented Sam J. Jones, to whom human speech does not appear to be a natural tongue, and those rara avae, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger (were there ever two more perfect names for such as these?), who have transcended species, perhaps even phylum.

If one cannot fathom the mythic pull of the tongue-tied, lumbering beefcake as exemplified by Mature or Lundgren (and dontcha just know that in their heart of hearts they all want to a.s.say the role of Hamlet), there is at least an inkling of what it is that draws us to the last of this parade of Idolized Meat.

Stallone first captured our respect and affection by turning his life into an American success story worthy of Horatio Alger, and then gave us a genuine sternum punch of an object-lesson in our own schizoid national character by JekyllHydeing into a Rocky/Rambo gaucherie of arrogance, insolence, brutality, and crippled expectations.

Schwarzenegger departs from the enigma of beefcake through the exeunt left of having demonstrated a cynical sense of humor about himself, about "the business," and about the archetypes he is supposed to represent. The superman, the unstoppable engine, the n.o.ble savage. Any man who can make a joke on himself about how much more gracefully the stop-motion robot in Terminator moves than he does, is a man whose career as an actor might well outdistance mere testosterone.

But as Michael Healy points out in the review I quoted earlier, the sneaky pleasure we derived from watching Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron and Terminator is absent from humorless, jaundiced slaughterfests like Commando, Raw Deal, Predator and, most particularly, The Running Man.

This film is the latest in a demonstration of how paucive intelligences will loot the treasurehouse. It knows nothing of the logic of science fiction. Nothing of the internal tensions that make sf work on the screen, a la Blade Runner. Nothing of extrapolation along sensible lines. This is one of those utterly unworkable "future societies" that makes no sense, save in the rathole rationalizations of know-nothings and studio heads. There is no characterization-which in a film that stars Schwarzenegger is a knife through the gut-not even for an actor as compelling as Yaphet Kotto. They are set-ups, to be gunned down for the predilection of thug audiences for whom the judgment scale of quality is measured in liters of blood and spilled entrails.

And so Schwarzenegger's Ben Richards becomes, in the clubby hands of Steven E, de Souza and director Paul Michael Glaser (who I can never remember which he was, Starsky or Hutch), nothing but a chunk of Idolized Meat with bad puns grafted on.

If this film has any claim to posterity, it will be due to the spectacular performance of Richard Dawson as Damon Killian, the tv game show host. It is a performance so dazzling that one can a.s.sume d.i.c.kie Dawson wasn't this year's Oscar winner for Best Male Supporting because of the redolent nature of the film itself.

And the crusher that denied Dawson his moment of international acclaim is the same crusher that flattens us, as aficionados of the literature of imagination. The crusher is the Little White Lie that steals from the treasurehouse and dulls the patina of the artifact, and subst.i.tutes Idolized Meat for the rapture of the sense of wonder. And gets you to pay for, and then praise indiscriminately, the devalued product.

Can it be that you have been reduced to the lowest idiot expectancy because of the untutored nature of the Illiterate Audience?

Well, let me leave you with the words of Stephen King, who has often said the best a writer can hope for, from Hollywood is when "they buy the rights, pay you half a million dollars, for some reason never make the movie-but you get to keep the half million without the embarra.s.sment of some awful film coming out."

Which is a whole h.e.l.luva lot sweeter than no one knowing Sheckley or Clement were there first, and ain't gonna see a kopeck for the error of cleverness and early arrival.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / September 1988 INSTALLMENT 32:.

In Which The Switch Is Thrown

It often seems laughable to me how I, and other film critics, ceaselessly belabor the lack of verisimilitude in films. As a pract.i.tioner of fiction- the pure cobbling-up of lies that have the semblance of truth but which are, at splashdown, merely inventions ab.u.t.ting Reality only where necessary to sucker in the reader -it does frequently seem to me to be a hypocritical carp that operates off a double standard, serving the critic in a not entirely respectable fashion.

Like demanding a greater n.o.bility from oppressed peoples than that demonstrated by those who oppress them. South Africa, for instance. Botha's government can repress, brutalize, maim, lock-out, censor, incarcerate, and kill-and that's "maintaining order." But let a Homelands black pick up a rock and s.h.a.g it at an Afrikander with a water cannon, and it's "terrorist activity."

Yet when we reach the target area of criticism, it is just such an unsettling absence of verisimilitude that looms largest in our judgments of a film's worth. Our trust can be lost in an instant. Just one flip we don't believe, and we're off the menu. Go figure.

I'm not talking about technical or factual errors that don't impede the flow of story. (The kind that apologists for films, as well as arrogant producers and studio flacks, sneer at, and say, "Who the h.e.l.l will know the difference?" Thus allowing, even condoning, the perpetuation of intentional or just dumbheaded corruptions of fact for "story value.") I'm not talking about releasing a film t.i.tled Krakatoa: East of Java, when that volcanic island actually lies in the Sunda Strait, west of Java. I'm not talking about having the sun set in the east in the recent film Sunset, or having the sun rising in the west in The Green Berets. I'm not talking about having Metropolis (which is New York City) and the Great Wall of China simultaneously in daylight in Superman IV, though they're on opposite sides of the planet, Daily or otherwise. I'm not talking about ex-slaves in the crowd scenes of Spartacus wearing wrist.w.a.tches.

That sort of thing is pooh-pooh'd by the same phylum of semi-literate plant life that excuses the soundtrack explosions in deep s.p.a.ce and the whoooosh of s.p.a.ceships as they dart around in imbecile imitation of Spads and Fokkers (a convention now so inst.i.tutionalized that I've thrown up my hands and swear never to mention it again). No, I'm not talking about such thousand natural shocks to which the flesh is heir.

I'm talking about the visual shticks that make us groan. The moments we are expected to accept, in action films usually, that wrench from an audience the involuntary cry of, "Oh fer chrissakes, gimme a break!"

I suppose, for want of proper ThinkTank stats on this, that something like a Common Sense Switch cuts in, when we're asked to believe the foma of filmmakers. We seem to have no trouble accepting, say, the convention of Wile E. Coyote standing in midair, just beyond the lip of the cliff, looking around for the Road Runner, scratching his head, perfectly safe in defiance of the laws of the physical universe, just buoyed up by nothing, till he glances down and sees the abyss beneath his feet. We gladly accept that he has time to register a forlorn double-take, still standing in midair, until the epiphany of imminent gravity sinks in . . . and then he falls. But let the same sort of thing happen in live-action, and we deliver a raspberry at the screen that is as sincere as it is succulent. What I'm talking about is: * James Bond hop-skipping across the backs of the alligators in Live and Let Die.

* Schwarzenegger in Commando, falling 350 feet from an L10-11, into a swamp, getting up without even shaking his head, and trotting blithely away at peak efficiency to do battle.

* "Bones" McCoy being such an inept physician that he injects himself by mistake in the rewritten version of "City on the Edge of Forever."

* The rubber life raft containing Indy, Short Round and Willie not flipping upside-down like b.u.t.tered bread when it's dropped, as they go over the cliff in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom; or the four-foot-tall Short Round karate-kicking into unconsciousness all those six-feet-tall trained thuggee a.s.sa.s.sins.

* "The best hired killers in the galaxy" using heat-seeking laser rifles that lock onto a target automatically, regularly missing their first shots, so they alert Sean Connery to each bushwhack in Outland.

* The hi-tech choppers in Blue Thunder strafing each other in the center of downtown high-rise Los Angeles, blowing up buildings that rain gla.s.s and concrete on crowds, and harming not one pedestrian, save when they are pelted by fried chickens.

* Robocop firing through the skirt of a woman hostage, missing her pudenda, and searing off the b.a.l.l.s of the thug holding her up in front of him as a shield.

* Stallone, in Rambo: First Blood II apparently doing what cannot be done by a human being, when he literally flies up from a lake to the port of a chopper hovering twenty- five feet above the water. Apparently kicking off from the lake bottom and defying water pressure to break all world's championship high jumping records.

* And my all-time favorite: the a.s.sa.s.sins of Rame Tep, by the hundreds, come-and-go to-and-from a gigantic wooden pyramid built smack in the middle of Victoria's London, in Young Sherlock Holmes, and no one has ever noticed the tons of building materials schlepped into the area, nor heard the sound of sawing and hammering, nor paid any attention to the skinheaded hordes frequenting the vicinity.

What I'm talking about here is, "Oh, fer chrissakes, gimme a break!"

In that instant, the Common Sense Switch is thrown, and they've lost us. From that instant forward, they have to work very hard, very diligently, and with absolute purity of intent to win back our willing suspension of disbelief. (For all of us, that is, save those undiscriminating filmgoers who perceive of their lot in life as being one with the doork.n.o.b: to be turned and shoved and left covered with smudgy handprints. Those who expect to be lied to, and don't think they can do anything about it. Those who cannot summon up sufficient feelings of self-worth to believe they are due something truer and more inventive. Those who believe in boom! and whoooosh!) It is the single cinematic common denominator that brooks no defense, that unites even navel-lint examiners like me with F/X-dulled adolescents like a very few of you. Such importunate demands on audience credibility can be seen, and the groans are pandemic; whether interpreted by a critic as "the film suffers from a herky-jerky rhythm" or by the casual filmgoer as "I didn't believe it . . . it was dumb." Dumb, as in dull-witted, stupid; not as in speechless.

That having been said, I submit (without the faintest ort of anger or outrage, truly more in sorrow than glee) that the instant throwing of the Common Sense Switch by whole theatersfull of movie nuts is the reason Willow (MGM/Lucasfilm) died a quick and awful death at the box office, while Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Touchstone) has made more than one hundred and fifty million dollars to the date I write this. And both deserve what they got: though the former is live-action, meticulously rendered with as much state of the art cleverness as a $35 million budget can buy in terms of the most accomplished technicians in the world; and the latter is utterly wacky, combining jaw-popping animation and live-action playars pantomiming and reacting against toons that were not there when they spoke their lines. The former, for all its heavy-breathing and sweaty struggles to make fantasy realms mimetic, is not for a moment believable. The latter, despite its clearly deranged juxtaposition of animated cartoons and live knockabout comedy, captures our trust from the first frames.

Apart from the awesome risk-taking of Roger Rabbit, from original conception to final cut, there is a surefootedness, an imperial arrogance at its brave beastliness, a confidence in its ability to cajole even Scrooge into adoration, that one cannot find in parallel unless one goes back to Alien, Fantasia, Pinocchio or the 1939 Thief of Bagdad.

(The film becomes a yardstick. You show me someone who has seen Roger Rabbit, whose face doesn't break into an idiot grin, who doesn't fall over him/herself to recollect a shot, a shtick, a boffo line that brought convulsions, who prefaces any remarks with "Well, I have problems with it and I'll show you a Grinch unfit to live with decent people. You show me someone who didn't like, who didn't love that film, and I'll show you someone whose opinion on anything should not be trusted. In a world a.s.s-deep in cupidity, inept.i.tude, meanspiritedness, fanaticism, random violence and anguish, how often are we given a treasure like Roger Rabbit, a dear soft fuzzy thing that asks only that we be happy and roll around in it like a puppy in a goose-down comforter? You show me a damfool who carps about anything in Roger Rabbit, and I'll show you . . . someone who likes eating lima beans.) Deponent sayeth this: the fault lies not in its stars, but in its basic conception. Willow, that is. I'll get to the conception of Roger Rabbit anon. Because of its excellence, it requires less attention. We learn more from failures than from successes, because if a success is based on originality, then by deconstructing it, by trying to a.n.a.lyze it and codify it, we only find the replicable elements. And that's of value primarily if we're trying to emulate the success in an imitation. By the very nature of its originality, it ran risks that could not be gauged beforehand. It's akin to dissecting a b.u.t.terfly to learn why it flies as it does, and in so doing, we destroy the beauty that was its essence. And since this column is foursquare against cheap imitations, we need not shred Roger Rabbit merely to discover that it was the first of its kind to go as far as it did. We know that. And we know that's why it wows. But Willow falls far and falls fast and falls flat: from which height we can learn the angle and severity of the trajectory of failure.

Deponent sayeth: the fault lies in George Lucas. No one else had a hand in it. Not the hundreds of technicians, not the actors, not the unfortunate writer Bob Dolman, who was called in to complete the script, not even one of the names or companies we see on the extended credits. It was George Lucas who (as prerelease publicity told us) "studied myths from around the world before defining Willow to his satisfaction." It is the film Lucas wanted to make, based on the story Lucas dreamed up, exec-produced by Lucas, and directed in Lucas-fashion by his hand-picked choice, Ron Howard.

And what are we presented with?

The "saga" of Willow Ufgood is a ramekin of congealed porridge and curdled cream. There is far more of farina than fantasy in this wearisome, woebegone farrago of stolen set-pieces and New Age muddleheadedness. George Lucas has either taken utter leave of his senses, or the world of today has taken utter leave of George Lucas. For this is the kind of sloppy, inarticulate, inconsistent, unbelievable, fuzzyheaded c.r.a.p that flower children read to one another in crash pads in Iowa. After half a century of C. S. Lewis, Mervyn Peake, Clifford Simak, Daniel Ma.n.u.s Pinkwater, Time Bandits, Madeleine L'Engle, Fritz Leiber and-though most prominently, scarcely my fave-J. R. R. Tolkien, for a rational adult even remotely au courant to believe this pile of unwashed hand-me-downs has any freshness, is a delusion at least on a par with those held by Ponce de Leon, Mary Baker Eddy, and Bishop James Ussher.

Instead of Moses in the bullrushes, we have a cynical nod to NOW and a silly male's idea of feminism with the foundling converted to baby girl. Instead of Snow White's Queen Grimhilde, we have Queen Bavmorda, rasping, clenching, geshrying, and seeking the death of this child bearing "the sign" that a seer has vouchsafed marks the one who will overthrow the evil ruler. Instead of Han Solo, we have Val Kilmer as the c.o.c.ky freebooter Madmartigan: liar, deceiver, cutpurse, self-server, but with a wh.o.r.e's heart of iron pyrite. Instead of Munchkins, we have Nelwyns. At least they don't have fuzzy feet. Instead of- But you catch my drift.

Hand-me-downs. Flotsam and jetsam from a thousand ripoff Middle-Earth, Middle-Ages, Middle-Cla.s.s fantasies. Cobbled together into one of those interminable "journey" templates where an unruly a.s.sortment of bizarre traveling companions dashes about like Michael Jackson fans in search of scalper's tickets. Weird beasties, much senseless swordplay, magic without logic introduced helterskelter when the "plot" begins to falter, noise and fireworks . . . and none of it able to pluck the heart-strings, much less appeal to the rational.

All of it, despite its pomposity and bench-press sweatiness intended to convince us it's possible, nothing but impetus for the throwing of the Common Sense Switch. We watch it, we leave, and we forget it. Having wasted our time and our ticket money.

George Lucas has wasted years, however.

Following, as it does, on the heels of Lucas's last bold plunge into idiocy, Howard the Duck, we can only stare in utter confusion at such a suicidal effort. Has Lucas taken leave of his senses? Did he truly think there was anything in this mush to compel our love?

Deponent suggests the Blight of Shirley MacLaine has caught up with the Executive Producer.

In an upcoming essay it is my intention to go at considerable length to an examination of the Illiterate Audience. Not now. But part of the thesis is prefaced in the artifact called Willow. That element of the total theory dealing with the rampant spread of obscurantism that manifests itself in the foolish antics of pseudo-Christians at The Last Temptation of Christ, the resurgence of acceptance of spiritualism, now called "channeling," the goofy vogue for crystals, traveling to "focus locations" for Harmonic Convergences, the seeming lack of outrage that the Reagan Oligarchy regularly consulted and paid heed to a court astrologer (the last major world leader to have such a soothsayer on the payroll was. .h.i.tler, if you recall), and all the other soph.o.m.oric diddles the average citizen now considers part of the Rational Universe. Geraldo Rivera and Oprah and Morton Dunderhead, Jr. present . . .

Road signs on the journey back into ignorance.

And Willow, product of this New Age nonsense, tells a story that not even the shriven can tolerate. Dulled, confused, awash in their own inability to cope with a world filled with tax forms and interfacing and accessing and Star Wars Defense Systems, a world in which mediocre men seek to be President and giant corporations truly rule, a world in which blame can only be supported if it can be laid at the feet of Chance or G.o.d, even in such a world the faithful cannot accept such arrant nonsense.

And the Common Sense Switch is thrown.

We can only be thankful that we have been given Roger Rabbit. A film as mad as anything we've ever seen; a story as unlikely as any we've ever known; a dream and a delight that for all its unbelievable elements, is more down-to-earth and sensible than the "realistic" films we're told reflect Our Times.

Deponent suggests we ponder for an instant, without anger and without raising our voices, in what a lowly state we exist, that the most rational icon given to us to adore, is an adaptation of Gary Wolf's bugf.u.c.k novel, in a cinematic ordering of what used to be considered absolute fantasy. Is something odd here, or did I wake up this morning in an alternate universe?

Further, deponent sayeth not.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / January 1989.

INSTALLMENT 33:.

In Which The Canine Of Vacuity Is Wagged By The Far More Interesting Tale Of O'Bannon.

Quite a bit more than a few, but less than many, years ago, I attended the premiere of a major motion picture I had written. Well, yes, I'd written it, but it had been rewritten by both the director and the producer. Not very much to its benefit, as it turned out. Which is not to say that I, as a first-time scenarist, had written a screenplay that would have given Richard Brooks or Richard Breen even twinges of envy . . . but it had some sprightly moments, this screenplay as I'd written it; and it has a few lines that I can still hear without wincing (when, in moments of masochism, I pull out the videoca.s.sette for a crawl down Memory Slough). Every once in a while, no doubt fully aware of my anhedonia as regards this film, no doubt aware of my embarra.s.sment at how badly the film turned out-though it made millions for the studio and production company-no doubt aware that it will cause me pain, some reincarnated dung-beetle now reborn as a fan, complete with rancid breath and overinflated opinion of his/her skills with the bon mot, oozes up to me in a public place and (usually loud enough to include total strangers) demands to know how I could have written such an awful film.

Well, there are all sorts of explanations for a film having gone wrong, but in this case it was probably at least one-third my fault. It was terribly directed, extravagantly and expensively produced but with an impoverishment of taste or imagination; it was miscast hideously; and rewritten till every vestige of fun or originality had been removed from my original screenplay based on a not-very-good popular novel of the time. Which is not, I say again, to let me off the hook. It was my first film, and I thought I could do no wrong, and if I were to go back and re-read that scenario I'd certainly wince at the soph.o.m.orisms.

(Which has nothing to do with the rudeness of the human chancre who throws it up in my face in much the same way, I'm sure, that smarta.s.ses prod Roger Ebert with his having worked on the raunchy 1970 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, directed and co-scripted with Ebert by Russ Meyer. I've seen pod-brothers of the ambulatory phlegm who gig me for [the intentionally unnamed] cinematic abomination I wrote when I was in my early thirties, more than two decades ago, who have smarmily leered at Roger and oh-so-innocently inquired how such an erudite film critic and excellent journalist could have been part of "a project like that." And I've seen that tight, brave little smile Roger subst.i.tutes for the more appropriate, but less gentlemanly, left cross to the moron's jaw, and I identify with it, because I've used it myself. And I know just how Roger feels. I can recall with agonizing clarity the night I attended the world premiere of my filmic mea culpa, at a great old movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard, with searchlight beams cutting wedges out of the sky above the City of the Angels, with live tv coverage and crowds being held back behind velvet ropes, and entering the theater having been kept from seeing even one frame of the produced film a priori by producers and studio fearful I'd p.i.s.s on their parade by way of prerelease denunciation in Variety. As the film was run, and the audience roared ever more often and ever more derisively at what was not intended as a comedy, I shrank within my rented tuxedo and slipped lower and lower in my seat till I could barely see the screen. I withered, understanding that before my eyes I was witnessing the ritual slaughter of my budding career as a writer of theatrical motion pictures. I was dead on, of course. There is a moment near the outset of one's career in Hollywood, when the Big Break manifests itself. Taken at the flood, that moment can stretch and carry one into a word-of-mouth security that can withstand an occasional flop. But if the moment goes sour, for whatever reasons, one can continue working, making a decent living, but there is a taint that thereafter attaches to all who are identified with the plague-bearing item. And that stigma became the word-of-mouth that lobbied against my getting other big-budget, serious writing a.s.signments for the large screen. It's been a long time since it all happened, and though I suffer a frisson of sadness for What Might Have Been, like Roger Ebert I've put it behind me, and work as skillfully as I can on the projects that do come my way. But I remember. And I suppose it is logged in my life as one of the few episodes on the list of If I Could Do It Over . . . ) So I know, to the core I know, how my friend Rockne O'Bannon feels when he tells me he has not seen, and will not accompany me and Susan to see, a screening of his first feature film, Alien Nation (20th Century Fox). I know how he feels, and I hear him explain how the producer, Gale Anne Hurd, she who was allied with, married to, separated from, director James Cameron, altered his vision. I hear him, and I sympathize, because the litany is not only one I've shrilled endlessly, but which bears within itself the echoes of artistic pain from thousands of screenwriters who came before us. He cannot bear to sit watching what became of his work, as I was forced to sit that long-ago night on Hollywood Boulevard, writhing before the projected images of corrupted invention.

Let me tell you a little about Rock O'Bannon. Not only because he is a pal of mine, or because we worked together on the 198586 revival of The Twilight Zone television series for CBS (though that is a secret agenda I would be less than forthright to conceal), but because I tell you what I truly and deeply believe: Rock O'Bannon is a writer of uncommon talent, vast promise, and urgently in need of a kick in the a.s.s from one he knows likes and admires him. But more important, he is emblematic of the kind of men and women who are, more and more overwhelmingly, coming to be the model of young people writing films these days in a medium schizophrenic to the point of hysteria.

Here is what the studio press packet on Alien Nation says of Rock: Born in Los Angeles, Rockne S. O'Bannon was raised in the film industry; his father was a gaffer and his mother a contract dancer at MGM. While most ten-year-olds were reading The Hardy Boys and comic books, he was reading screenplays smuggled home by his father. He learned the business by working in the mailroom and leading guided tours at a major studio. He went on to work as a production a.s.sistant on Lorimar's television productions The Waltons and Apple's Way.

From age eight O'Bannon knew he wanted to be a writer. His first stab at screenwriting was developing a script for what he thought was a natural spin-off of his then favorite television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. ent.i.tled "Boy from U.N.C.L.E." O'Bannon continued writing screenplays through high school and upon graduation took six months off to concentrate seriously on his writing. That's when he moved from mailroom to production a.s.sistant at Lorimar.

After leaving Lorimar, he returned to college to continue his English studies, but in a short time dropped out when he got a job at MGM. He stayed there several years working in the publicity department and the story department, simultaneously writing the studio's company newspaper.

Having an office to himself afforded O'Bannon the means to continue writing scripts while working at his job. After he had written several scripts on spec, his agent submitted a script for the recently revived Twilight Zone television series. The producers were so impressed with his "Wordplay" episode that they hired him to write more scripts and to serve as the story editor for the first season. He went on to work as a consultant during the second season. During the hiatus, he wrote the "Life on Death Row" episode of Steven Spielberg's anthology series, Amazing Stories.

It was during this period that O'Bannon met Alien Nation's co-producer, Richard Kobritz, and told him of his story idea for the film, formerly t.i.tled Outer Heat. They have since formed a partnership and are developing a project which O'Bannon plans to direct with Kobritz serving as the producer.

When the producers of The Twilight Zone were trying to inveigle me into returning to television after ten years of voluntary abstinence from that most beguiling and lucrative of addictions, they sent me a small stack of scripts that had been accepted by CBS as correct for the re-thunk, contemporary version of that cla.s.sic series. Several of them were knockouts, several of them were acceptable, several of them were stinkers, and one of them blew me into orbit.

It was Rock's eighteen-page, airtime-seventeen-minute story, "Wordplay." It was a marvel. Nothing less than a marvel.

If you missed it, you missed one of the cla.s.sic moments of fantasy on television, and a tale of imagination that is, in my view, on a par with the very best that has ever been done in the genre of the fantastic: A perfectly average guy wakes one odd day to find that everyone is speaking a different language. Well, not exactly. It's still English, but the words have different meanings, different uses. A brash, young guy who works in the protagonist's company approaches him for advice. He says: "Hey, Mr. Thompson. You know that new girl in accounting? Barbie? I've been asking her out and finally, today, she says okay-but she's gonna be here in five minutes and I can't think of anyplace to take her for dinosaur. I mean, I thought of the Capitol Inn, but then that might look like I'm trying too hard. What d'you think?"

Thompson looks at him and laughs. He replies, "You're planning to take this young woman out for dinosaur, huh?"

And when the kid repeats it, confused at Thompson's wry response, Thompson thinks he's putting him on. The kid gets huffy. "Look, Mr. Thompson, if you don't want to, uh, or can't think of anyplace, I'll just ask somebody else."

It gets worse and worse. More and more words gibber and dance out of Thompson's reach. Dinosaur, for lunch. Peaches, for rain. Segregate, for clear. On and on, till people are calling him Hinge instead of Bill, and his wife, trying to tell him that their child is dying and they must get him to a hospital, shrieks, "Dark outer! Kettle rod that thought collins around! Moon tight! Moon tight!"

In seventeen minutes, Rock O'Bannon creates, complicates and solves an apocryphal human dilemma that, in terms of modern fable, encapsulates the terror and helplessness of modern man's inability to orient himself in a bewildering technocratic society.

It is, in my view, simply brilliant, by every standard of fine writing we accept as necessary for the creation of true literature, true Art. He was twenty-eight years old when he wrote it.

I took the job on TZ, in large part, because the producers had been smart enough to snap up that script from the slush pile. If they could spot top-level writing like that, then there was hope for the series, and I might yet find myself working among artists, not sausage-merchants.

Working with Rock O'Bannon was a delight. I never thought of him as a tyro, as a youngster breaking in. He was a peer. And so he remains today.

But Alien Nation, his debut as a feature film writer, is a woeful, empty thing. He was thirty-two when he wrote it, last year. I'll get back to Rock, and that kick in the a.s.s, in a moment; but first, let me review Alien Nation for you, so you won't waste your money seeing it.

Los Angeles. Near future. Three hundred thousand aliens, bred to be workers, slaves, beanfield hands from outer s.p.a.ce, arrive on Earth. They look a lot like us, but are grotty enough to be considered the new "n.i.g.g.e.rs." They are shunted into a ghetto, and because they have been bred to adapt almost totally to whatever environment becomes their lot, they are soon just like all of us-shopkeepers, cops, hookers, fast-food clerks, mechanics, street thugs. Suddenly, there is a murder of a human by a "slag" (the epithet for "newcomer"). Unthinkable. So a human cop, played by James Caan, is linked with the first "newcomer" to make the grade of detective on the LAPD, Mandy Patinkin as Sam Francisco. Together they set out to solve the baffling murder, mysteriously linked to the slaying of two "newcomers."

Baffling, as in Oh, did I nod off, dear? Did I miss anything? Mysterious, as in I've got to take a leak; tell me what I missed. Want me to pick up some popcorn while I'm out there?

And for the next ninety-four minutes of running time, we have the cinematic equivalent of Gerald Ford's presidency. Nothing of consequence happens.

Here is a sixteen-seventeen million dollar film that functions as a perfect soporific. It isn't even bad enough to be a howler, bad enough to spark vituperation, bad enough to become a cult favorite for those who dote on turkeys. It is just lugubrious. Somnolent. Derivative. Empty. Yes, that's just what it is: empty calories. Not even interesting junk food. No spice, no jump, not even stupid enough to provide uncooked meat for the disputatious critic to amuse his basest instincts. It is, in the vernacular of my people, a lox. It doth but lie there and rot from the head down.

With the arrogance of the arriviste, above the credits we are told this is A GRAHAM BAKER FILM. Now, if that fails to bring you to your feet with an admixture of awe and gladness, it is because you probably never heard of Graham Baker. His previous credits are the cla.s.sic draughts from the Waters of Lethe t.i.tled The Final Conflict and Impulse. If we are to judge Mr. Baker's potential from this trio of bow-wows, I suggest that the degree of directorial scintillance contained in the batch prepares Mr. Baker for a world-cla.s.s dive into oblivion.

Or a return to directing television commercials in England.

As for the acting, both Terence Stamp and Mandy Patinkin are wasted, performing like shamble-ons excised from a rough cut of Night of the Living Dead; James Caan looks old, tired, puffy and lackadaisical, employing the same thespic shrugs and tics we've seen him subst.i.tute for character insight before and since his outstanding performances in The Gambler (1974) and Thief (1981); and everyone else appears to be as one with Jay McInerney's "brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers" waiting for the Bolivian Marching Powder of cocaine to galvanize them into frenetic action.

Not only is the film slow as the erosion of mountains, but it is slovenly in its basic logic and in its tiniest details: the latter exemplified by Caan returning to his home, trying to find something to eat, eyeing the detritus of a dozen fast food banquets littering the kitchen, living room, bedroom, a vast terrain of garbage . . . and not one c.o.c.kroach in sight. Trust me on this one, folks. I live in Los Angeles, and while we aren't the c.o.c.kroach paradise of, say, New Orleans or New York City, it is impossible to leave that much c.r.a.p lying about in the heat without sounding an orthopterous klaxon that would draw Blattidae from as far away as Pomona. But pristine is Caan's pad, nary an ant-black, red or white-as far as the camera eye can see.

The former is exemplified by the simplistic treatment of three hundred thousand aliens from outer s.p.a.ce being plopped into the middle of Los Angeles. There is virtually no social or physical alteration in the makeup of the city as we know it today. Everyone dresses the same, talks the same, acts the same, and for a budget of 1617 million, the minutiae of a major new immigrant population is nil. The only one that sticks in my memory is the repellent concept of fast food burger joints serving "raw beaver" (with the fur still on it) alongside the fishwich and fries.

Consider, if you will, the changes in Miami with the arrival of far fewer Cuban refugees. The changes in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange County with the arrival of Laotians, Cambodians, Koreans and Vietnamese. The changes in New York that altered even that endlessly mutable melting pot at each new wave of Irish, Middle Europeans, Jews, Puerto Ricans. If you have no sense of history to point out the ludicrousness of what Alien Nation subst.i.tutes for solid sociological ideation, just compare what I've described here with the society portrayed in Blade Runner.

And the worst part of this imbecile determination to discount even the least venturous attempt at extrapolation, is that for 94 minutes we have nothing original to look at.

Coupled with that boring, overexposed, overfamiliar Los Angeles setting we've wearily endured through ten thousand flicks, is a sound mix of intrusive rock so excruciating that we cannot decipher the dialogue, which may be, on further consideration, a blessing in disguise. Ah, yes, disguise.

Which brings us to disguise.

This is nothing more than the same old buddy-movie formula with dopey latex masks. Mask disguises for a good ole boys liaison.

And here is where I draw back my Lou Groza toe to dropkick Rock O'Bannon's a.s.s.

The great scenarist Ring Lardner, Jr.-The Cross of Lorraine; M*A*S*H; Woman of the Year; and Tomorrow, The World just to name a few-once opined: "No good film was ever made from a poor script." So, though I have made it clear that affection and respect inform my opinions of Rockne S. O'Bannon, even as I accept about one-third of the blame for that long-ago awfulness I wrote when a newcomer to the screenplay, Rock must accept the initial blame for Alien Nation. It's a commercially cynical idea. Rock sat there one day (I was a fly on the wall . . . this is how it happened . . . trust me) and suddenly he said aloud, "Hey, what a great obvious idea for a thriller! A cop-buddy movie with a human being and an alien! h.e.l.l, we can cast Patrick Swayze as the human and put John Candy in a funny suit for the alien! Hot s.h.i.t, this'll make me a fortune!"