The Essential Ellison Part 56

"Without a solid script the director and his/her players can have all the charisma and verve in the universe, and they'll wind up standing around the sound stage with fingers up their noses."

"With the Eyes of a Demon: Seeing the Fantastic as a Video Image," THE CRAFT OF SCIENCE FICTION, edited by Reginald Bretnor, Harper & Row, 1976 Now come(by way of $5 million in advertising)the clear facts(1200 theaters booked on a 90/10 split)of illusion(matte paintings, scale modes, lab-process trickery): The tornado transport from Kansas to Oz is a muslin wind sock and fuller's earth in fuzzy focus. The facein the wicked Queen's mirror is roto-scoped at 24 frames per second. A ravaged, demon-possessed younggirl's head swivels 180 and audiences no longer distinguish a human actress from a dummy.

Should our century be remembered for anything beyond the hard facts of technological advance, it willlikely be for the creation of the most global of modern myths.

Hollywood: Magic.

In the seventy plus years since the film "industry" was born, the screenwriter has had the hardest battlegaining widespread recognition of his/her worth. We easily remember Cary Grant's portrayal of helplessdesperation and Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k's filmic mastery in North by Northwest. Aside from screen buffs,however, who remembers the writer, Ernest Lehman? Some might say it's only words on paper in aformat difficult to read and comprehend.

How odd. Movie stars marry and divorce, support charities, tubthump politicians. A famous but agedcostume designer expires, reminding millions of how nice so-and-so looked in such-and-such an outfit.Directors orchestrate images with a style that is recognized when the film budget is too low or too high(especially too high). Headlines exploit these stories.

These film artists may be talented, but in reality all of them work for the dreamer: the Hollywood writer.

As with each form of creative output he's mastered, Harlan succeeded in Hollywood by learning thesystem and then cramming into it all his intelligence and craft. He didn't back off even when the powers-that-be failed to comprehend his methods.

The complete story of Harlan's experiences in filmland would fill a book this size, but the cross-sectionhere offers a range of dreams and disasters that provides a useful scale.

"The Resurgence of Miss Ankle-strap Wedgie" (1968) puts the lie to nasty roman a clef novels,superficial autobiographies and distorted film-movement histories that bury us year after year in tinseled effluvia. That this particular exposure is cast in the form of fiction does not lessen the validity of its insight but, astonishingly, increases it. No individuals need be protected or disguised, and no studio can claim slander, yet they prowl over this sticky web as the legs on the monstrous black widow that Harlan is examining. The mechanics of the Hollywood system have altered since this story was written, just as the system that pervades that other famous Hollywood reverie, Nathanael West's THE DAY OF THE LOCUST, is no longer operative. But it doesn't matter. As were West and Horace McCoy (THEY SHOOT HORSES, DON'T THEY?) before him, Harlan is concerned with the portrayal of the social web and the helpless flies who blunder into entrapment. The nature of the situation comes into focus only when we realize that this particular spider is man-made, unreal, a movie fantasy-and, sadly, no less deadly for that. (As with every piece in this book, the text reprinted here is the preferred; indeed, this version, checked against Harlan's original ma.n.u.script, includes a sentence missing from every previous incarnation of this story.) A number of Harlan Ellison's scripts have appeared on television, along with fragments that flickered momentarily in motion pictures, and he has a record number of awards from the Writers Guild of America to attest to the quality of his work as written. Hollywood, however, has a habit of altering scripts-not surprising when one understands the collaboration of art and business necessary to get a film made-and Harlan has seldom, if ever, managed to push a script through in its original form. Not to mention his file drawer of screenplays that have yet to be produced.

A skeletal script seems to have the best chance of materializing as a completed film by slipping through the paradox of ignorant Hollywood producers and the intense demands of story quality. Harlan's scripts have a tendency to veer too far to the side of quality and are written with incredibly detailed, comprehensive visuals. This is not always to his overall benefit when his work must be accessible to functional illiterates as well as to the more sophisticated.

"Flintlock" (1972) is a previously unpublished teleplay that exists because of typical industry methods: an attempt to cash in on the successful 1966 film Our Man Flint, a humorous send-up of the spy movies that proliferated in the wake of James Bond. Harlan uses the camera's eye with a champion awareness of what it can really do-Shots 97 through 106 are a flawless example of this mastery-as he tumbles through a lighthearted plot that carries on the sardonic tradition of Derek Flint. If you can catch a rerun of the 1976 tv-film that eventually made its way onto the Gla.s.s Teat, something t.i.tled Our Man Flint: Dead on Target, then perhaps you'll see why Harlan's script remained words on paper. It's so much easier for the studios to rely on the standard approach...which is why you're now watching soap operas set in Beverly Hills 90210 and other suck-it-up pacifiers.

"The Man on the Mushroom" (1974), "Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto" (1974), and "Face-Down in Gloria Swanson's Swimming Pool" (1978) are Harlan's reports on working in Hollywood, from his arrival in 1962 through the perils and pleasures that followed. The town learned about Harlan Ellison the hard way, and his subsequent reputation there for being a " difficult" talent certainly points up the truth in Robert Bloch's droll a.s.sessment of him as " the only living organism I know whose natural habitat is hot water."

In a system riddled with thievery and spite, it's a pleasure to see someone demand ethics and justice and receive national prominence doing it. The first of Harlan's major legal victories was a lengthy and very expensive court action in which a federal court jury in 1980 awarded $337,000 in damages for copyright infringement resulting from ABC and Paramount's tv-pilot Future Cop, which Harlan and Ben Bova charged had been plagiarized from Harlan's screen treatment of their novella, "Brillo." As Harlan shows us, again and again, even in fantasy, even in Hollywood fantasy, the truth will eventually be known.

"Without recourse to the remark crude, I have been known to point out that tv sucks."

"Days of Blood and Sorrow," Introduction to THE OTHER GLa.s.s TEAT, Pyramid, 1975 The Resurgence Of Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie (Dedicated to the Memory of Dorothy Parker) HANDY.

In Hollywood our past is so transitory we have little hesitation about tearing down our landmarks. The Garden of Allah where Benchley and Scott Fitzgerald lived is gone; it's been replaced by a savings and loan. Most of the old, sprawling 20th lot has been converted into shopping center and beehive-faceted superhotel. Even historic relics of fairly recent vintage have gone under the cultural knife: the Ziv television studios on Santa Monica, once having been closed down, became the eerie, somehow surrealistic, weed-overgrown and bizarre jungle in which tamed cats that had roamed sound stages became cannibals, eating one another. At night, pa.s.sing the studio, dark and padlocked, you could hear the poor beasts tearing each other apart. They had lived off the film industry too long, and unable to survive in the streets, lost and bewildered, they had turned into predators.

That may be an apocryphal story. It persists in my thoughts when I remember Valerie Lone.

The point is, we turn the past into the present here in Hollywood even before it's finished being the future. It's like throwing a meal into the Disposall before you eat it.

But we do have one recently erected monument here in the glamour capital of the world.

It is a twenty-three-foot-high billboard for a film called Subterfuge. It is a lighthearted adventure-romance in the James Bond tradition and the billboard shows the princ.i.p.al leads-Robert Mitchum and Gina Lollobrigida-in high fashion postures intended to convey, well, adventure and, uh, romance.

The major credits are listed in smaller print on this billboard: produced by Arthur Crewes, directed by James Kencannon, written by John D. F. Black, music by Lalo Schifrin. The balance of the cast is there, also. At the end of the supplementary credits is a boxed line that reads: ALSO FEATURING MISS VALERIE LONE as Angela.

This line is difficult to read; it has been whited-out.

The billboard stands on a rise overlooking Sunset Boulevard on the Strip near King's Road; close by a teenie-bopper discotheque called Spectrum 2000 that once was glamorous Ciro's. But we tear down our past and convert it to the needs of the moment. The billboard will come down. When the film ends its first run at the Egyptian and opens in neighborhood theaters and drive-ins near you.

At which point even that monument to Valerie Lone will have been removed, and almost all of us can proceed to forget. Almost all of us, but not all. I've got to remember ... my name is Fred Handy. I'm responsible for that billboard. Which makes me a singular man, believe me.

After all, there are so few men who have erected monuments to the objects of their homicide.

1.

They came out of the darkness that was a tunnel with a highway at the bottom of it. The headlights were animal eyes miles away down the flat roadbed, and slowly slowly the sound of the engine grew across the emptiness on both sides of the concrete. California desert night, heat of the long day sunk just below the surface of the land, and a car, ponderous, plunging, straight out of nowhere along a white centerline. Gophers and rabbits bounded across the deadly open road and were gone forever.

Inside the limousine men dozed in jump seats and far in the rear two bull-necked cameramen discussed the day's work. Beside the driver, Fred Handy stared straight ahead at the endless stretch of State Highway 14 out of Mojave. He had been under the influence of road hypnosis for the better part of twenty minutes, and did not know it. The voice from the secondary seats behind him jarred him back to awareness. It was Kencannon.

"Bert, how long till we hit Lancaster or Palmdale?"

The driver craned his head back and slightly to the side, awkwardly, like some big bird, keeping his eyes on the road. "Maybe another twenty, twenty-five miles, Mr. K'ncannon. That was Rosamond we pa.s.sed little while ago."

"Let's stop and eat at the first clean place we see," the director said, thumbing his eyes to remove the sleep from them. "I'm starving."

There was vague movement from the third seats, where Arthur Crewes was folded sidewise, fetuslike, sleeping. A mumbled, "Where are we what time izit?"

Handy turned around. "It's about three forty-five, Arthur. Middle of the desert."

"Midway between Mojave and Lancaster, Mr. Crewes," the driver added. Crewes grunted acceptance of it.

The producer sat up in sections, swinging his legs down heavily, pulling his body erect sluggishly, cracking his shoulders back as he arched forward. With his eyes closed. "Jeezus, remind me next time to do a picture without location shooting. I'm too old for this c.r.a.p." There was the murmur of trained laughter from somewhere in the limousine.

Handy thought of Mitchum, who had returned from the Mojave location earlier that day, riding back in the air-conditioned land cruiser the studio provided. But the thought only reminded him that he was not one of the Immortals, one of the golden people; that he was merely a two-fifty-a-week publicist who was having one h.e.l.luva time trying to figure out a promotional angle for just another addle-witted spy-romance. Crewes had come to the genre belatedly, after the Bond flicks, after Ipcress, after Arabesque and Masquerade and Kaleidoscope and Flint and Modesty Blaise and they'd all come after The 39 Steps so what the h.e.l.l did it matter; with Arthur Crewes producing, it would get serious attention and good play dates. If. If Fred Handy could figure out a Joe Levine William Castle Sam Katzman Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k shtick to pull the suckers in off the streets. He longed for the days back in New York when he had had ulcers working in the agency. He still had them, but the difference was now he couldn't even pretend to be enjoying life enough to compensate for the aggravation. He longed for the days of his youth writing imbecile poetry in Figaro's in the Village. He longed for the faintly moist body of Julie, away in the Midwest somewhere doing h.e.l.lo, Dolly! on the strawhat circuit. He longed for a hot bath to leach all the weariness out of him. He longed for a hot bath to clean all the Mojave dust and grit out of his pores.

He longed desperately for something to eat.

"Hey, Bert, how about that over there ... ?"

He tapped the driver on the forearm, and pointed down the highway to the neon flickering off and on at the roadside. The sign said SHIVEY'S TRUCK STOP and EAT. There were no trucks parked in front.

"It must be good food," Kencannon said from behind him. "I don't see any trucks there; and you know what kind of food you get at the joints truckers eat at."

Handy smiled quickly at the reversal of the old road-runner's myth. It was that roundabout sense of humor that made Kencannon's direction so individual.

"That okay by you, Mr. Crewes?" Bert asked.

"Fine, Bert," Arthur Crewes said, wearily.

The studio limousine turned in at the diner and crunched gravel. The diner was an anachronism. One of the old railroad car style, seen most frequently on the New Jersey thruways. Aluminum hide leprous with rust. Train windows fogged with dirt. Lucky Strike and El Producto decals on the door. Three steps up to the door atop a concrete stoop. Parking lot surrounding it like a gray pebble lake, cadaverously cold in the intermittent flashing of the pale yellow neon EAT off EAT off EAT ...

The limousine doors opened, all six of them, and ten crumpled men emerged, stretched, trekked toward the diner. They fell into line almost according to the pecking order. Crewes and Kencannon; Fred Handy; the two cameramen; three grips; the effeminate makeup man, Sancher; and Bert, the driver.

They climbed the stairs, murmuring to themselves, like sluggish animals emerging from a dead sea of sleep. The day had been exhausting. Chase scenes through the rural town of Mojave. And Mitchum in his G.o.ddam land cruiser, phoning ahead to have escargots ready at La Rue.

The diner was bright inside, and the grips, the cameramen and Bert took booths alongside the smoked windows. Sancher went immediately to the toilet, to moisten himself with 5-Day Deodorant Pads. Crewes sat at the counter with Handy and Kencannon on either side of him. The producer looked ancient. He was a dapper man in his middle forties. He clasped his hands in front of him and Handy saw him immediately begin twisting and turning the huge diamond ring on his right hand, playing with it, taking it off and replacing it. I wonder what that means, Handy thought.

Handy had many thoughts about Arthur Crewes. Some of them were friendly, most were impartial. Crewes was a job for Handy. He had seen the producer step heavily when the need arose: cutting off a young writer when the script wasn't being written fast enough to make a shooting date; literally threatening an actor with bodily harm if he didn't cease the senseless wrangling on set that was costing the production money; playing agents against one another to catch a talented client unrepresented between them, available for shaved cost. But he had seen him perform unnecessary kindnesses. Unnecessary because they bought nothing, won him nothing, made him no points. Crewes had blown a tire on a freeway one day and a motorist had stopped to help. Crewes had taken his name and sent him a three thousand dollar color television-stereo. A starlet ready to put out for a part had been investigated by the detective agency Crewes kept on retainer at all times for a.s.sorted odd jobs. They had found out her child was a paraplegic. She had not been required to go the couch route, Crewes had refused her the job on grounds of talent, but had given her a check in the equivalent amount had she gotten the part.

Arthur Crewes was a very large man indeed in Hollywood. He had not always been immense, however. He had begun his career as a film editor on "B" horror flicks, worked his way up and directed several productions, then been put in charge of a series of low-budget films at the old RKO studio. He had suffered in the vineyards and somehow run the time very fast. He was still a young man, and he was ancient, sitting there turning his ring.

Sancher came out of the toilet and sat down at the far end of the counter. It seemed to jog Kencannon. "Think I'll wash off a little Mojave filth," he said, and rose. Crewes got up. "I suddenly realized I haven't been to the bathroom all day."

They walked away, leaving Handy sitting, toying with the sugar shaker.

He looked up for the first time, abruptly realizing how exhausted he was. There was a waitress shaking a wire basket of french fries, her back to him. The picture was on schedule, no problems, but no hook, no gimmick, no angle, no shtick to sell it; there was a big quarterly payment due on the house in Sherman Oaks; it was all Handy had, no one was going to get it; he had to keep the job. The waitress turned around for the first time and started laying out napkin, water gla.s.s, silverware, in front of him. You could work in a town for close to nine years, and still come away with nothing; not even living high, driving a '65 Impala, that wasn't ostentatious; but a lousy forty-five-day marriage to a clip artist and it was all in jeopardy; he had to keep the job, just to fight her off, keep her from using California divorce logic to get that house; nine years was not going down the tube; G.o.d, he felt weary. The waitress was in the booth, setting up the grips and cameramen. Handy mulled the nine years, wondering what the h.e.l.l he was doing out here: oh yeah, I was getting divorced, that's what I was doing. Nine years seemed so long, so ruthlessly long, and so empty suddenly, to be here with Crewes on another of the endless product that got fed into the always-yawning maw of the Great American Moviegoing Public. The waitress returned and stood before him.

"Care to order now?"

He looked up.

Fred Handy stopped breathing for a second. He looked at her, and the years peeled away. He was a teenage kid in the Utopia Theater in St. Louis, Missouri, staring up at a screen with gray shadows moving on it. A face from the past, a series of features, very familiar, were superimposing themselves.

She saw he was staring. "Order?"

He had to say it just right. "Excuse me, is, uh, is your name Lone?"

Until much later, he was not able to identify the expression that swam up in her eyes. But when he thought back on it, he knew it had been terror. Not fear, not trepidation, not uneasiness, not wariness.

Terror. Complete, total, gagging terror. She said later it had been like calling the death knell for her ... again.

She went stiff, and her hand slid off the counter edge. "Valerie Lone?" he said, softly, frightened by the look on her face. She swallowed so that the hollows in her cheeks moved liquidly. And she nodded. The briefest movement of the head.

Then he knew he had to say it just right. He was holding all that fragile crystal, and a wrong phrase would shatter it. Not: I used to see your movies when I was a kid or: Whatever happened to you or: What are you doing here. It had to be just right.

Handy smiled like a little boy. It somehow fit his craggy features. "You know," he said gently, "many's the afternoon I've sat in the movies and been in love with you."

There was grat.i.tude in her smile. Relief, an ease of tensions, and the sudden rush of her own memories; the bittersweet taste of remembrance as the glories of her other life swept back to her. Then it was gone, and she was a frowzy blonde waitress on Route 14 again. "Order?"

She wasn't kidding. She turned it off like a mercury switch. One moment there was life in the faded blue eyes, the next moment it was ashes. He ordered a cheeseburger and french fries. She went back to the steam table.

Arthur Crewes came out of the men's room first. He was rubbing his hands. "d.a.m.ned powdered soap, almost as bad as those stiff paper towels." He slipped onto the stool beside Handy.

And in that instant, Fred Handy saw a great white light come up. Like the buzz an acid-head gets from a fully drenched sugar cube, his mind burst free and went trembling outward in waves of color. The shtick, the bit, the handle, ohmiG.o.d there it is, as perfect as a bluewhite diamond.

Arthur Crewes was reading the menu as Handy grabbed his wrist.

"Arthur, do you know who that is?"

"Who who is?"

"The waitress."

"Madame Nehru."

"I'm serious, Arthur."

"All right, who?"

"Valerie Lone."

Arthur Crewes started as though he had been struck. He shot a look at the waitress, her back to them now, as she ladled up navy bean soup from the stainless steel tureen in the steam table. He stared at her, silently.

"I don't believe it," he murmured.

"It is, Arthur, I'm telling you that's just who it is."

He shook his head. "What the h.e.l.l is she doing out here in the middle of nowhere. My G.o.d, it must be, what? Fifteen, twenty years?"

Handy considered a moment. "About eighteen years, if you count that thing she did for Ross at UA in forty-eight. Eighteen years and here she is, slinging hash in a diner."

Crewes mumbled something.

"What did you say?" Handy asked him.

Crewes repeated it, with an edge Handy could not place. "Lord, how the mighty have fallen."

Before Handy could tell the producer his idea, she turned, and saw Crewes staring at her. There was no recognition in her expression. But it was obvious she knew Handy had told him who she was. She turned away and carried the plates of soup to the booth.

As she came back past them, Crewes said, softly, "h.e.l.lo, Miss Lone." She paused and stared at him. She was almost somnambulistic, moving by rote. He added, "Arthur Crewes ... remember?"

She did not answer for a long moment, then nodded as she had to Handy. "h.e.l.lo. It's been a long time."

Crewes smiled a peculiar smile. Somehow victorious. "Yes, a long time. How've you been?"

She shrugged, as if to indicate the diner. "Fine, thank you."

They fell silent.

"Would you care to order now?"When she had taken the order and moved to the grill, Handy leaned in close to the producer and began speaking intensely. "Arthur, I've got a fantastic idea."

His mind was elsewhere. "What's that, Fred?"

"Her. Valerie Lone. What a sensational idea. Put her in the picture. The comeback of ... what was it they used to call her, that publicity thing, oh yeah ... the comeback of 'Miss Ankle-Strap Wedgie.' It's good for s.p.a.ce in any newspaper in the country."

Silence.

"Arthur? What do you think?"

Arthur Crewes smiled down at his hands. He was playing with the ring again. "You think I should bring her back to the industry after eighteen years."