Stalking the Nightmare Part 17

At that time I was a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, West and I was very pro-union, pro-strike, pro-getting long overdue contract inequities with the producers straightened out.

Just before the strike began, Kline called and said he was taking out advertis.e.m.e.nts for the series. He said he'd had artwork done for the presentations, and he needed some copy to accompany the drawings. I asked him how he could have artwork done when the s.p.a.ceship had not yet been designed? (I was planning to create a vessel that would be absolutely feasible and scientifically correct, in conjunction with Ben Bova, then-editor of a.n.a.log.) Kline said there wasn't time for all that fooling-around, ads had to go out now!

It has always been one of the imponderables of the television industry to me, how the time is always now, when three days earlier no one had even heard of the idea.

But I gave him some words and, to my horror, saw the ad a week later: it showed a huge bullet-shaped thing I guess Kline thought was a s.p.a.ceship, being smacked by a meteorite, a great hole being torn in the skin of the bullet, revealing many levels of living s.p.a.ce within... all of them drawn the wrong direction. I covered my eyes.

Let me pause for a moment to explain why this was a scientifically-illiterate, wholly incorrect piece of art, because it was merely the first indication of how little the producers of The Starlost understood what they were doing.

Herewith, a Child's Primer of Science Fiction: There is no air in s.p.a.ce. s.p.a.ce is very nearly a vacuum. That means an interstellar vessel, since it won't be landing anywhere, and doesn't need to be designed for pa.s.sage through atmosphere, can be designed any way that best follows the function. The last time anyone used the bullet design for a starship was in The Green Slime, circa 1969 (a Nipponese nifty that oozes across the "Late Late Late Show" in the wee'est hours when normal folks are sleeping; this excludes systems a.n.a.lysts and computer programmers, of course).

But it indicated the lack of understanding of sf that is commonplace among television executives who, for the most part, have not read an entire book since they left high school.

Look: if you turn on your set and see a pair of white swinging doors suddenly slammed open by a gurneypushed by two white-smocked interns, you know that within moments Trapper John, M. D. (or Ben Casey, or Dr.

Kildare, or Marcus Welby) will be jamming a tube down somebody's trachea; if you see a snake-eyed dude in a black Stetson lying-out on a b.u.t.te, aiming a Sharps .52 caliber buffalo rifle, you know that within moments the Wells Fargo stage is gonna come a-thunderin' down that dusty trail; if Dan Tana (or Mannix, or Jim Rockford, or Ironside) comes into his inner office and there's a silky lady lounging in the chair across from his desk, showing a lot of leg, you know that by the end of Act One someone is going to try ventilating his (or Magnum's) hide. It's all by rote, all templates, all stolen from what went before by a generation of writers and producers whose only referents are what they grew up with watching television; it's all cliche, all predictable.

And while I make no brief for the reams and volumes of low-grade, moronic Star Wars imitation s.p.a.ce opera hackwork that has turned this into the worst period in the history of sf, the genre is not predictable. Or at least it shouldn't be.

(Though s.h.i.t like Battlestar Ponderosa and Universal's Buck Rogers seem to a.s.sure us that the steamroller mediocrity of tv can even trivialize sf, despite the built-in deterrents.) A science fiction story has to have interior logic. It has to be consistent, even within the boundaries of its own extrapolative horizons. That's irreducible in the parameters of what a sf story or teleplay must do, in order to get the reader or viewer to go along with it, without feeling conned or duped or lied to. Rigorous standards of plotting must be employed to win that willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience; it allows them to accept a fantastic premise.

How many sf movies have you seen--Outland, Message From s.p.a.ce, Silent Running are perfect awful examples--during which you recognized soph.o.m.oric inaccuracies that made you groan and feel cheated? Errors that first-year science students would not make: sound in a vacuum, people walking around on alien planets without filtration masks, clones that spring fully grown from fingernail parings, robots that act like midgets in metal suits.

Break that logical chain, dumb it up, accept the insulting myth that no one knows or cares if the special effects are spectacular enough, and the whole thing falls apart like Watergate testimony.

But the ad was only an early storm warning of what troubles were yet to befall me. The strike was called, and then began weeks of a kind of ghastly hara.s.sment I'd always thought was reserved for overblown melodramas about the Evils of Hollywood. Phone calls at all hours, demanding I write the "bible" for the series. (A "bible" is industry shorthand for the precis of what the show will do, who the characters are, what directions storylines should take. In short, the blueprint from which individual segments are written. Without a bible, only the creator knows what the series is about.) Kline had no bible. He had nothing, at this point, but that seven-minute tape. With which item, plus my name and the name of Doug Trumbull--who, at that time had done the special effects for 2001 and had directed Silent Running--he'd been signed on as Executive Producer-Kline had--sans a contract with me!--sold this pipe dream to everyone in the Western World.

But I wouldn't write the bible. I was on strike. Then began the threats. Followed by the intimidation, the bribes, the promises that they'd go forward with the idea without me, the veiled hints of scab writers who'd be hired to write their own version of the series... everything short of actually kidnapping me. Through these weeks--when even flights out of Los Angeles to secluded hideaways in the Michigan wilds and the northern California peninsula failed to deter the phone calls--I refused to write. It didn't matter that the series might not get on the air, it didn't matter that I'd lose a potload of money, the Guild was on strike in a n.o.ble cause and, besides, I didn't much trust Mr. Kline and the anonymous voices that spoke to me in the wee hours of the night. And, contrary to popular belief, many television writers are men and women of ethic: they can be rented, but they can't be bought.

I remember seeing a film of Clifford Odets's The Big Knife when I was a young writer living in New York and l.u.s.ting after fame in Hollywood. I remember seeing the unscrupulous Steiger and his minions applying pressure to a cracking Palance, to get him to sign a contract, and I remember smiling at the danger-filled melodramatics. During that period of preproduction on The Starlost, I ceased smiling.

The threats ranged from breaking my typing fingers to insuring I'd never work in the Industry again. The bribes ranged from $13,000 to be placed in an unnumbered Swiss bank account to this: One afternoon before the strike, I'd been in Kline's office. I'd been leafing through the Players' Directory, the trade publication that lists all actors and actresses, with photos. I'd commented idly that I found the person of one pictured young starlet quite appealing. Actually, what I'd said was that I'd sell my soul to get it on with her.

Now, weeks later, during my holdout and Kline's attempts to get me to scab, I was puttering about my house, when the doorbell rang. I went to the door, opened it, and there stood the girl of my wanton daydreams. Bathed in sunlight, a palpable nimbus haloing that gorgeous face. I stood openmouthed, unable even to invite her in.

"I was in the neighborhood," she said, entering the house with no a.s.sistance from me, "and I've heard so much about you, I decided just to come and say h.e.l.lo."

She said h.e.l.lo. I said something unintelligible. (I have the same reaction when standing in front of Pica.s.so's Guernica. Otherworldly beauty has a way of turning my brains to prune-whip yogurt.) But it took only a few minutes of conversation to ascertain that yes, she knew Mr. Kline and, yes, she knew about the series, and...

I wish I could tell you I used her brutally and sent her back to where I a.s.sumed she had come from, but feminism has taken its toll and I merely asked her to split.

She split.

I couldn't watch any tv that night. My eyes were too swollen from crying.

And the cajoling went on. Kline, of course, knew nothing about the girl, had never had anything to do with sending her over, would be affronted if anyone even suggested he had tried such a loathesome, demeaning trick. h.e.l.l,I'd be the last one to suggest it. Or maybe second from the last.

But howzabout the scab writer threat? Well...

At one point, representatives of Mr. Kline did bring in a scab. A non-union writer to whom they imparted a series of outright lies so he'd believe he was saving my bacon. When they approached well-known sf writer Robert Silverberg to write the bible, Bob asked them point-blank, "Why isn't Harlan writing it?" They fumfuh'ed and said, well, er, uh, he's on strike. Bob said, "Would he want me to write this?" They knew he'd call me, and they told him no, I'd be angry. So he pa.s.sed up some thousands of dollars, and they went elsewhere. And this being the kind of world it is, they found a taker.

I found out about the end-run, located the writer in a West LA hotel where they'd secreted him, writing madly through a weekend, and I convinced him he shouldn't turn in the scab bible. To put the period to the final argument that Kline & Co. were not being honest, I called Kline from that hotel room while the other writer listened in on the bathroom extension phone. I asked Kline point-blank if other writers had been brought in to scab. He said no; he a.s.sured me they were helplessly waiting out the strike till I could bring the purity of my original vision to the project. I thanked him, hung up, and looked at the other writer who had just spent 72 hours beating his brains out writing a scab bible. "I rest my case."

"Let's go to the Writers Guild," he said.

It drove Kline bananas. Everywhichway he turned, I was there, confounding his shabby attempts at circ.u.mventing an honest strike.

I'll skip a little now. The details were ugly, but grow tedious in the re-telling. It went on at hideous length, for weeks. Finally, Glen Warren in Toronto, at Kline's urging, managed to get the Canadian writers guild, ACTRA, to accept that The Srarlost was a wholly Canadian-produced series. They agreed that was the case, after much pressure was applied in ways I'm not legally permitted to explicate, and I was finally convinced I should go to work.

That was my next mistake.

They had been circulating copies of the scab bible with all of its erroneous material, and had even given names to the characters. When I finally produced the authentic bible, for which they'd been slavering so long, it confused everyone. They'd already begun building sets and fashioning materiel that had nothing to do with the show.

I was brought up to Toronto, to work with writers, and because the producing ent.i.ty would get government subsidies if the show was clearly acceptable in terms of "Canadian content" (meaning the vast majority of writers, actors, directors and production staff had to be Canadian), I was ordered to a.s.sign script duties to Canadian tv writers.

I sat in the Four Seasons Motel in Toronto in company with a man named Bill Davidson, who had been hired as the Producer even though he knew nothing about science fiction and seemed thoroughly confused by the bible, and interviewed dozens of writers from 9 AM till 7 PM.

It is my feeling that one of the prime reasons for the artistic (and, it would seem, ratings) failure of The Srarlosr was the quality of the scripts. But it isn't as simple a matter as saying the Canadians aren't good writers, which is the cop-out Glen Warren and Kline used. Quite the opposite is true. The Canadian writers I met were bright, talented, and anxious as h.e.l.l to write good shows.

Unfortunately, because of the nature of Canadian tv, which is vastly different from American tv, they had virtually no experience writing episodic drama as we know it. ("Train them," Kline told me. "Train a cadre of writers?" I said, stunned. "Sure," said Kline, who knew nothing about writing, "it isn't hard." No, not if I wanted to make it my life's work.) And, for some peculiar reason, with only two exceptions I can think of, there are no Canadian sf writers.

But they were willing to work their hearts out to do good scripts. Sadly, they didn't have the kind of freaky minds it takes to plot sf stories with originality and logic. There were the usual number of talking plant stories, giant ant stories, s.p.a.ce pirate stories, westerns transplanted to alien environments, the Adam-&-Eve story, the after-the-Bomb story... the usual cliches people who haven't been trained to think in fantasy terms conceive of as fresh and new.

Somehow, between Ben Bova and myself--Ben having been hired after I made it abundantly clear that I needed a specialist to work out the science properly--we came up with ten script ideas, and a.s.signed them. We knew there would be ma.s.sive rewrite problems, but I was willing to work with the writers, because they were energetic and anxious to learn. Unfortunately, such was not the case with Davidson and the moneymen from 20th, NBC, Glen Warren and the CTV, who were revamping and altering arrangements daily, in a sensational imitation of The Mad Caucus Race from Alice in Wonderland.

I told the Powers in charge that I would need a good a.s.sistant story editor who could do rewrites, because I was not about to spend the rest of my natural life in a motel in Toronto, rewriting other people's words. They began to scream. One gentleman came up to the room and banged his fist on the desk while I was packing to split, having received word a few hours earlier that my mother was very ill in Florida. He told me I was going to stay there in that room till the first drafts of the ten scripts came in. He told me that I was going to write the pilot script in that room and not leave till it was finished. He told me I could go home but would be back on such-and-such a date. He told me that was my schedule.

I told him if he didn't get the h.e.l.l out of my room I was going to clean his clock for him.

Then he went away, still screaming; Ben Bova returned to New York;; I went to see my mother, established that she was somehow going to pull through, returned to Los Angeles; and sat down to finish writing the pilot script.

This was June already. Or was it July. Things blur. In any case, it was only weeks away from airdate debut,and they didn't even have all the princ.i.p.als cast. Not to mention the special effects Trumbull had promised, which weren't working out. The production staff under the confused direction of Davidson was doing a dandy impression of a Balinese Fire & Boat Drill; Kline was still madly dashing about selling something that didn't exist to people who apparently didn't care what they were buying; and I was banging my brains out writing "Phoenix Without Ashes," the opening segment that was to limn the direction of the single most expensive production ever attempted in Canada.

I was also brought up on charges by the Writers Guild for writing during the strike.

I called Marty the agent and threatened him with disembowelment if he ever again called me to say, "Go see Bob Kline." In my personal lexicon, the word "kline" could be found along with "eichmann," "dog catcher," "cancer"

and "rerun."

But I kept writing. I finished the script and got it off to Canada with only one interruption of note: The name Norman Klenman had been tossed at me frequently in Toronto by the CTV representative and Davidson and, of course, by Kline and his minions. Klenman, I was told, was the answer to my script problems. He was a Canadian writer who had fled to the States for the larger money, and since he was actually a Canadian citizen who was familiar with writing American series tv, he would be acceptable to the tv board in Ottawa under the terms of "Canadian content" and yet would be a top-notch potential for scripts that need not be heavily rewritten. I was too dazed in Toronto to think about Klenman.

But as I sat there in Los Angeles writing my script, I received a call from Mr. Klenman, who was at that moment in Vancouver. "Mr. Ellison," he said, politely enough, "this is Norman Klenman. Bill Davidson wanted me to call you about The Starlost. I've read your bible and, frankly, I find it very difficult and confusing... I don't understand science fiction... but if you want to train me, and pay me the top-of-the-show money the Guild just struck for, I'll be glad to take a crack at a script for you." I thanked him and said I'd get back to him when I'd saved my protagonist from peril at the end of act four.

When I walked off the show, the man they hired not only as story editor to replace me, but to rewrite my script, as well, was Norman Klenman who "don't understand science fiction."

My walkout on my brain child, and all that pretty fame and prettier money was well in the wind by the time of Klenman's call, but I was still intending to write the scripts I'd contracted for, when the following incidents happened, and I knew it was all destined for the ashcan.

I was in Dallas. Guest of honor at a convention where I was trying to summon up the gall to say The Starlost would" be a dynamite series. I was paged in the lobby. Phone call from Toronto. It was Bill Davidson. The conversation describes better than ten thousand more words what was wrong with the series: "Major problems, Harlan," Davidson said. Panic lived in his voice.

"Okay, tell me what's the matter," I said.

"We can't shoot a 50-mile-in-diameter biosphere on the ship."

"Why?"

"Because it looks all fuzzy on the horizon. "

"Look out the window, Bill. Everything is fuzzy on the horizon."

"Yeah, but on tv it all gets muddy in the background. We're going to have to make it a 6-mile biosphere."

"Whaaaat?!"

"Six miles is the best we can do."

There is a pivotal element in the pilot script where the hero manages to hide out from a lynch mob. In a 50-mile biosphere that was possible. In a 6-mile biosphere all they had to do was link arms and walk across it. "But, Bill, that means I'll have to rewrite the entire script."

"Well, that's the best we can do."

Then, in a blinding moment of satori I realized Davidson was wrong, dead wrong; his thinking was so limited he was willing to sc.r.a.p the logic of the script rather than think it through. "Bill," I said, "who can tell the difference on a tv screen, whether the horizon is six miles away or fifty? And since we're showing them an enclosed world that's never existed before, why shouldn't it look like that! Shoot defacto six miles and call it fifty; it doesn't make any d.a.m.ned difference!"

There was a pause, then, "I never thought of that."

Only one indication of the unimaginative, hidebound and obstinately arrogant thinking that emerged from total unfamiliarity with the subject, proceeded through mistake after mistake, and foundered on the rocks of inability to admit confusion.

The conversation went on with Davidson telling me that even if Trumbull's effects didn't work and they couldn't shoot a 50-mile biosphere--after he'd just admitted that it didn't matter what distance they said they were showing--I'd simply love the set they were building of the control room.

"You're building the control room?" I said, aghast with confusion and disbelief. "But you won't need that till the last segment of the series. Why are you building it now?"

(It should be noted that one of the Maltese Falcons of the series, one of the prime mysteries, is the location of the control room biosphere. When they find it, they can put the ark back on course. If they find it in the first segment, it automatically becomes the shortest tv series in history.) "Because you had it in your bible," he explained.

"That was intended to show how the series ended. for G.o.d's sake!" I admit I was screaming at that point. "If they find it first time out, we can all pack our bags and play an hour of recorded organ music!"

"No, no," Davidson argued, "they still have to find the backup computer, don't they?""Aaaaarghh," I aaaaarghhed. "Do you have even the faintest scintilla of an idea what a backup control is?"

"Uh, I'm not certain. Isn't it the computer at the back of the ship?"

"It's a fail-safe system, you drooling imbecile; it's what they use if the primary fails. The primary is the control... oh to h.e.l.l with it!" I hung up.

When I returned to Los Angeles, I found matters had degenerated even further. They were shooting a 6-mile biosphere and calling it six miles. They said no one would notice the discrepancy in the plot. They were building the control room, with that arrogant ignorance that could not be argued with. Ben Bova, who was the technical advisor, had warned them they were going about it the wrong way; they nodded their heads... and ignored him.

Then Klenman rewrote me. Oh boy.

As an indication of the level of mediocrity they were seeking, "Phoenix Without Ashes" had been ret.i.tled, in one of the great artistic strokes of all time,,, Voyage of Discovery." I sent them word they would have to take my name off the show as creator and as writer of that segment. But they would have to use my pseudonym, to protect my royalties and residuals. (They had screwed up my creation, but r d be d.a.m.ned if I'd let them profit from the rape.) Davidson reluctantly agreed. He knew the Writers Guild contract guaranteed me that one last weapon.

"What's your pen-name, we'll use it, what is it?"

"Cordwainer Bird," I said. "That's b-i-r-d, as in 'for the birds. ' "

Now he was screaming. He swore they'd fight me, they'd never use it, I was denying them the use of my name that was so valuable with science fiction fans. Never! Never!

G.o.d bless the Writers Guild.

If you tuned in the show before it vanished from all earthly ken you saw a solo credit card that said CREATED BY CORDWAINER BIRD.

and that's your humble servant saying the Visigoths won again; Bova walked off the series the week after Trumbull left, because of scientific illiteracies he'd warned them against, such as "radiation virus" (which is an impossibility... radiation is a matter of atoms, viruses are biological ent.i.ties, even as you and I and Kline and Davidson, I presume), "s.p.a.ce senility" (which, I guess means old, feeble, blathering vacuum), and "solar star" (which is a terrific illiterate redundancy like saying "I live in a big house home").

The Starlost came up a loser, as do most tv series. Because they don't understand the materials with which they have to work, because they are so tunnel-visioned into thinking every dramatic series can be transliterated from the prosaic and over-familiar materials of cop, doctor and cowboy shows, because there was so much money to be skimmed... another attempt at putting something fresh and innovative on the little screen came up a loser.

Is mine an isolated bit of history? A case of sour grapes attributable to the intransigent nature of a writer whose credentials come red-stamped with the warning that he is a troublemaker? Hardly.

In TV Guide in October of 1964 the excellent Merle Miller told in detail how his series Calhoun had come a cropper. In February of 1971, again in TV Guide, the well-known sf author and historian James Gunn related how they leavened and dumbed The Immortal out of existence after fifteen weeks. Through the years, right up to the 1981 anthology series Dark Room--suicidally placed opposite first The Dukes of Hazzard and then moved to a primetime spot facing Dallas by ABC--which was canceled after six airings, the story is the same. This time it was my turn, that's all.

Have you, gentle reader, learned anything from this angst? Probably not. Viewers seem not to care about authenticity, accuracy, logic, literacy, inventiveness. Friends call me when they see reruns of The Starlost in Canada, and they tell me how much they like it. I snarl and hang up on them.

The upshot of all the foregoing was precisely what I had predicted when I cut out of that deranged scene.

NBC had gone into the series with a guarantee of sixteen episodes firm, and an almost guaranteed pickup option for eight more. But the ratings were so low, in virtually every city where the series was aired--sometimes running opposite the nine thousandth rerun of I Love Lucy or scintillating segments of Zen Archery for the Millions--that NBC bailed out after the first sixteen.

The shows were so disgracefully inept, so badly acted, uniformly directed with the plunging breakneck pace of a quadruple amputee crossing a busy intersection, based in confusion and plotted on the level of a McGuffey's primer... that when the show was canceled after sixteen weeks, there were viewers who never knew it was missing.

When it was dumped, and I got the word from a contact at the network, I called one of Kline's toadies, and caroled my delight. "What the h.e.l.l are you so d.a.m.ned happy about," he said,, 'you just lost a total of $93,000 in partic.i.p.ation profits."

"It's worth ninety-three thousand bucks to see you f.u.c.kers go down the toilet," I said.

But even though I fell down that rabbit-hole in TV Land and found, like Dorothy, that it wasn't Kansas, or any other place that resembled the real world, I have had several moments of bright and lovely retribution-c.u.m-vindication.

At one point, when the roof started falling in on them, they called Gene Roddenberry, the successful creator of Star Trek, and they offered him fifty percent of the show if he'd come up and produce the show out of trouble for them. Gene laughed at them and said what did he need fifty percent of a loser for, he had a hundred percent of two winners of his own. They said they could understand that, but did he have someone else in mind whom he could recommend as producer? Gene said, sure he did.

They made the mistake of asking him who.

He said, "Harlan Ellison. If you hadn't f.u.c.ked him over so badly, he could have done a good job for you."

Then he hung up on them. Which is just what the viewers did.

The second bright moment was when the trial board of the Writers Guild judged me Not Guilty of scabbing. It was a unanimous decision by some of the finest writers in Hollywood, and I was reinstated on the WGA's Board of Directors thereafter. Nonetheless, were I ever to forgive the thugs and fools who took the labor of a year and corrupted it so completely that I felt nothing but shame and fury for a long time after, I can never forgive them for placing me in such jeopardy with the craft guild to which I proudly belong. More than likely, had my efforts to thwart and circ.u.mvent 20th Century-Fox's anti-strike efforts in producing the series not been so blatant, and so infuriatingly effective to Kline and his superiors, I might well have been tagged with that most vile and inexcusable sobriquet: scab.

There is no forgiveness in me for that part of the monstrous history of The Starlost.

But the brightest moment of all came on March 2lst, 1974 when I became the first person in the history of the Writers Guild of America to win the Most Outstanding Teleplay Award for the third time, with the original version of the pilot teleplay for The Starlost, "Phoenix Without Ashes."

The original script, my words, my dream; not the emasculated and insipid drivel that was aired; but my work, as I wrote it, before the trolls f.u.c.ked it over; that screenplay won the highest writers' award Hollywood can give.

In the category of "best dramatic-episodic script," meaning continuing series, as opposed to anthologies or comedies, there were eight nominees out of 400 top submissions: four segments of The Waltons. a Gunsmoke, a Marcus Welby and an episode of Streets of San Francisco. And my original teleplay... selected as the best for the year 1973.

It should be noted that unlike Emmys and Oscars, which are political in nature, are bought and sold and lobbied for with hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent in trade paper advertis.e.m.e.nts by studios and networks that realize the box-office value of such popularity prizes, the WGA awards are given solely on the basis of written material; in blind judging with the names of the authors removed, by three tiers of blue-ribbon readers (most of whom are previous winners) whose ident.i.ties are kept strictly secret.

When I accepted the Award at the 26th Annual Awards Reception and Banquet in Hollywood, I said, in part, "If the f.u.c.kers want to rewrite you... smash them!"