In Which Li"l White Lies Are Revealed To Be At Least Tattletale Gray
Among the many readers" letters to the n.o.ble Fermans who edit this magazine, responding to my column before last, in which I asked those who enjoyed these outings to drop a note vouchsafing same as palliative to the incessant b.i.t.c.hing of those who don"t like the cut of my jib (to rea.s.sure my employers that Watching isn"t Ferman"s Folly), was a lovely note from a woman in Hilton, Pennsylvania, containing a question no one had asked me before. A question that I had to think about for several days before I understood how important it is in setting the cut of my jib. I"ve waited to answer her here, because I wanted the thoughts and response to be absolutely fresh, since I"m setting down this personal revelation for the first time.
She asked: "You always seem so angry. Perhaps it is your bellicose manner that puts off the readers who write such nasty letters. How is it that you can get so upset about what is, after all, only a movie? Sometimes you seem so filled with rage that I feel the heat through the paper. Wouldn"t your comments be just as effective with a little less of the flamethrower?"
Hmmm. And several days more of hmmm. Till I"d thought it out, working diligently to strip my response of self-serving rationalizations. And after much self-examination, this is what I get: I am no different from any of you in this major att.i.tude: I don"t like being lied to.
Like you, I get crazy when someone tells me untruths that serve their ends and in the bargain warp the perception of reality. It is why I despise Edwin Meese, our soon-to-be-dumped Attorney General. He lies about the way we, as a nation, look at erotic material, the family unit, personal ethics, and the role of the government in handling lawlessness. It"s why I can abide Billy Graham and l.u.s.t for an Uzi to silence Falwell and Swaggart and Robertson. The former has a deep and abiding faith in something I may consider arrant superst.i.tion, but he seems genuine in his belief and willing to let others carry on their lives without ramming his book down their throats. The latter are self-serving demagogues; tyranny and elitism of the worst sort in their hearts; playing on the fears and prejudices of the gullible who seek succor in a world seemingly deteriorating around them. They lie endlessly, in aid of nothing n.o.bler than divisiveness, with a Salem witch trial methodology that only serves to send their const.i.tuency into a tighter downward spiral of hatred, alienation and dependency on the irrational. They lie about the way the world works, and their obfuscations serve not the commonweal, but the demagogues" need for power, and their exchequers.
When we are lied to by a used car dealer or respond to tv advertising and buy a product that is not as represented, the least rancorous of us flails against the walls within our head, and cries for redress. We are lied to by governments, by our elected officials with secret agendas set down by lobbyists, by relatives and friends who think they are doing it "for our own good," but who are, in fact, trying to keep the lake calm for their own journey, and by a business community that deals in floating ethics for the benefit of the bottom line.
We are lied to constantly, in a thousand small ways every day; and the less actively we call them on it, the greater and more easily inst.i.tutionalized are the lies that follow.
Lying, as a matter of policy, has always been one of the staples of the hype attendant on promotion of films. Some of it is fairly harmless, and even amusing: the bogus biographies of stars, cobbled up in the pr departments of the studios back to the twenties; William Castle"s publicity tricks and hyperbole that a.s.sured the filmgoer s/he would have a heart attack if s/he sat through the latest Castle offering, and so a nurse and pulmotor squad was in attendance at every screening; the hokey-pokey about 10 YEARS IN THE MAKING! that served to legitimatize ghastly extravaganzas, failing to mention that it had taken ten years to unleash the dog because the financing kept falling through.
But other movies have been sold to us, have been judged of note, on the basis of outright whoppers intended to add a patina of social value to otherwise tawdry efforts. These are not the little white lies that we wink at, because they"re silly and do no harm-the belief that a western actor actually punched cattle, when in truth the closest he had ever come to beeves was in their T-bone persona, slathered with ketchup-but the actively dishonest representations that coerce us into plonking down our money to see something special because of its origins.
Take, for instance, The Emerald Forest, a 1985 film written by Rospo Pallenberg and directed by John Boorman. This was a movie trumpeted in advance of its release as "based on a true story." Its advertising and most of the reviews about the film stressed the following claim: "He was seven years old when he disappeared from the Amazon damsite where his father . . . was at work . . . For ten years, the father spent every spare moment searching for his son. But when they met again, the boy knew only one father, the chief of the primitive Indian tribe called the "Invisible People" . . . "
In the film, the father is played by Powers Boothe and the son is portrayed by Boorman"s curly-blond-headed son Charley. They are Americans. In the postscript to the excellent Robert Holdstock novelization of the film (New York Zoetrope, 1985), we are told that the father was actually "a Peruvian whose son, Ezequiel, was kidnapped by Indians who attacked the family campsite along Peru"s Javari Mirim River." Already we begin to see a fudging of "the true story." And, reluctant to dismiss this sensational story, we accept the dishonesty by saying, "Well, the producers did it because they needed a box-office name for the general audience, and using a great Peruvian actor might be more authentic, but we wouldn"t enjoy the movie as much as if we can identify with an American, Powers Boothe or whomever."
But, as it turns out, converting the protagonists from Peruvian to Yanks is nowhere near the core of duplicity used to con us into validating this film as "based on a true story."
SCAN (which stands for Southern California Answer Network) is a reference program network set up to field inquiries from area librarians unable to locate answers to reference questions through the usual sources. They publish a splendid newsletter, filled with the responses to arcane queries initiated by librarians and other seekers after enlightenment.
In their Sept/Oct 1985 bulletin, Judy Herman, identified as "SCAN Humanities Subject Specialist," pulled the plug on Emba.s.sy Pictures and Mr. Boorman. I quote, in part, from her findings: "Interviews with director John Boorman reported that he had read the story in "the Times" in 1972, but library systems were unable to find such an account through indexes to the Los Angeles, New York and London Times.
"SCAN called the agent for screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg, and asked for the citation to the story Boorman read in "the Times." He said, "Let me make it clear: Rospo saw the story, not Boorman.""(And so, another step away from the Given Truth.) "The agent said he would check with Rospo and get back to us. He didn"t, so we called again. He said, "Let me make it clear: there was no one story the film was based on; it was a conglomeration of several stories. On the advice of our attorneys I cannot say more. If you need more information call Emba.s.sy Pictures."
"Surprisingly, Emba.s.sy gave the citation: Los Angeles Times, October 8, 1972, sec. F, p. 10.
"The L.A. Times story is datelined Brazil but all the places mentioned in it are in Peru. It does not name the father, but says he was a Peruvian working as a lumberman "along the Javari Mirim River, a tributary of the Javari, which lies in Peru."
"On the radio program "All Things Considered," Boorman said that he did not try to contact the father again because the story had been changed so much in the film he didn"t feel it really pertained to this father and son any more [italics Ellison"s], but he had talked to an anthropologist who had visited the tribe recently and the son was still living with them, now aged about 35." The tribe was called (in the Times piece) the Mayorunas.
The SCAN piece concludes with this politely querulous note: "This is rather strange, because an article in American Indigena (abril/junio 1975, pp. 329347) reports on the Mayorunas, with a detailed census by age and s.e.x, and does not mention that one of them was an adopted outsider." Much less a blond-curly-headed son of either a Peruvian or an American.
Thus, a rational consideration of all the tumult re: "based on a true story" leads any but the most gullible to the conclusion that a writer of fiction, Rospo Pallenberg, was sparked into creating an interesting fiction by an idea proceeding from a news snippet. So far, okay. It was then bought or appropriated by Boorman, who sold it to the Emba.s.sy honchos as "based on a true story" he had read. From that point on, it was never really questioned, and was set on its journey to your wallet by studio flacks who embellished and aggrandized and pumped hot air. And at the terminus, you and I went to that film, amazed at the bizarre and heartrending circ.u.mstances transmogrified from Real Life onto the Silver Screen.
We were lied to, and we bought it.
Not that knowing it was princ.i.p.ally fabrication, as opposed to slightly-al-tered-for-dramatic-effect made the film any less a pompous, strutting bore. But the being lied to . . . produces in me and possibly in you, now that you know you bit on it, a genuine anger. Like you, I don"t like being made to play the fool.
Or consider such pure fantasies as Hangar 18 (1980), a Sunn Cla.s.sic Picture that was sold with the cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-plotz a.s.surance of the producers that this was a movie that revealed the U.S. Air Force had captured a UFO, and that the s.p.a.cecraft was concealed in Hangar 18 . . . or Flying Saucer (1950) that received enormous amounts of publicity as containing actual footage of an Alaskan UFO sighting . . . or Frankenstein: The True Story (1973), from a screenplay by Christopher Isherwood, which was no closer to Mary Sh.e.l.ley"s novel than most of the other versions of the Modern Prometheus . . . or Sharks" Treasure (1975), a Cornel Wilde potboiler that made back its nut by advertising that swore you would see live sharks gnawing on happy natives, but which actually used dead sharks, pushed by hand from offcamera . . . or Ladyhawke (1985) that swore up"n"down that it was based on a genuine Medieval folktale, and was in fact simply a fictional construct cobbled up in the brain of the modern-day screenwriter . . . or The Philadelphia Experiment (1984), that was promoted as being the true story of a World War II battleship that slipped through a hole in time and wound up in the Eighties.
These are lies of a flagrant sort. They treat the audience as if it were populated by morons. At the very least they are films that consciously lie to promote themselves at the cost of spreading more obscurantism and looney beliefs in c.r.a.p like channeling, "communion" with aliens, crystals, creationism, and a vast array of newly-reborn scams that only serve to alienate an already-befuddled populace from the Real World and the directing of their lives at their own responsibility. At worst, they actively convince the gullible that they are powerless in the grip of "cosmic forces" that are responsible for their bad luck, lack of a job, f.u.c.ked-up relationships, and imminent demise from nuclear holocaust or angels with fiery swords.
Thus do I attempt to codify for the kind lady in Hilton, Pennsylvania why "just a movie" can send me into paroxysms of gibbering, thereby producing the flamethrower heat she finds overreactive. I wish I had a more rational answer to that anger-which I try to enn.o.ble by the word "pa.s.sionate"-but the simple truth as I"ve been able to perceive it, is that for the time I spend in the grip of a movie, I willingly surrender my disbelief; I am a child again, attending Snow "White and the Seven Dwarfs for the first time, and all I ask is: do it to me!
When the film lies, when it loses my trust by anyone of a hundred different inept.i.tudes or flummeries, I respond like a betrayed lover. I fume at Lethal Weapon because I know d.a.m.ned well that Mel Gibson would never be able to make that idiotic run down Hollywood Boulevard in his bare feet, because the street is never as empty as the film showed it, and the overpa.s.s at which he caught up with the fleeing Gary Busey is miles away from Hollywood Boulevard, and not even Paavo Nurmi with JATO Adidas could overtake a felon in a speeding car. I rage at Someone to Watch Over Me and Suspect because cops and lawyers are just flat-out not stupid enough to engage in such behavior that will get them stripped of their badges or disbarred. And if it is absolutely necessary for them to act in ways that are so anti-survival, then I can only suspend my disbelief if the scenarist displays a level of artfulness that blows away my perceptions of the Real World and explains it all so I can accept the rationalization. What we"re talking about is Art, as opposed to artifice. And when no attempt is made to reconcile the unbelievable fictive construct with my commonsense view of reality, then I get angry. Because I"ve been lied to.
Does that explain it?
Perhaps not. But I swear it"s the best I can do.
All of which leads me to the "review" of The Running Man (Taft Entertainment Pictures/Keith Barish Productions/Tri-Star), a film both Erick Wujcik of Detroit and Brian Siano of Philadelphia have asked me to discuss in detail. I had actually planned to deal with this latest vehicle for filmdom"s leading me-somorph, Arnold Schwarzenegger, rather summarily. But the subject of lying has spread its petals so appealingly, that I think I"ll put it over to next time, using this installment as a sort of preamble. So keep this screed in mind, and we"ll meet back here next month for Li"l White Lies, part two. And we"ll try to discover if The Running Man is actually a ripoff of Robert Sheckley"s "The Prize of Peril" and if The Hidden is really a ripoff of Hal Clement"s Needle or just a misappropriation of a 1982 script by Gerald Gaiser called Alien Cop.
And I"ll try to keep my temper.
ANCILLARY MATTERS: There are a handful of mythic icons that fantasists and their fans never tire of using or seeing used in stories. Hitler, the t.i.tanic, King Kong, King Arthur, Marilyn Monroe, Jack the Ripper . . . you get the idea. Very likely topping that small list is dinosaurs. You show me a kid or an adult who doesn"t get a smile and the shivers when you mention dinosaurs, and I"ll show you a kid or an adult who would happily eat lima beans or vote for Pat Robertson. Well, it"s not often that we are dazzled by some new variation on the presentation of the saurians, but Celestial Arts (PO Box 7327, Berkeley, CA 94707) has released a set of four dinosaur posters in their Dinosauria Graphics Series that will absolutely steal your breath away. They"re big-24 32 inches each-and they come in four flavors: Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus. The artwork is by Earl C. Bateman III, each one has a background grid with a metric scale to provide a sense of size, and each one has-are you ready for this-an overprinted skeleton that glows in the dark! Each one comes with a nifty little 16-page ill.u.s.trated booklet that contains the latest skinny on what we know about the saurians, and I"ve got to tell you that these are knockout posters. And you will love me for turning your attention to the set of four. Even if your spouse or roomie is a lima bean eater, you can pretend you"re buying these for some kid"s room, and make nocturnal visits to enjoy the glow-in-the-dark skeletons. These are visuals that will make you feel ten years old again.
In my February essay I used the old expression "liver and lights" and explained that it referred to "the soul and eyes." Well, y"know how you go through years and years misp.r.o.nouncing some word you"ve only read, and never actually heard spoken, and you get it wrong till one day you hear someone say it correctly and you thank your stars that no one ever caught you making a fool of yourself, and thereafter you p.r.o.nounce it properly? (With me it was the word minutiae, but that"s another story for another time.) I"d been using "liver and lights" for years and always thought it meant the soul and the eyes. I was wrong. As (among others) Jim Bennett of Newport, RI and Brad Strickland of Oak-wood, GA politely pointed out. Liver and lights, as the first pirate or barbarian warlord who used the phrase intended it, meant the liver and lungs, the entrails, the "umbles. Of which said pirate or warlord might make an ""umble pie," or of use to feed his dogs. Jim advised me "lights" is hunters" jargon for "lungs." I hate being wrong, but I love it when I"m set straight.
We are all in this together, it seems.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / May 1988 A NOTE ON SEQUENTIALLY.
There is nothing wrong with your neocortex. We control the vertical, we control the horizontal. These columns are in precisely the order I wish them to be: Installment 29, followed by Installment 30 , followed by 30 and 31. You can see from the publication dates that these are the sequence in which they appeared in print. If you ask why, I tell you it was because my attention was diverted. If you say that is irresponsible, I tell you that it"s my party, and I"ll cry if I want to. Yours truly, The White Rabbit.
INSTALLMENT 30 :.
In Which 3 Cinematic Variations On "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" Are Presented
On September 9th, 1977, 1 left for Paris to begin work with director William Friedkin on a theatrical feature based on my short story, "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs." The story, winner of a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award as best short story of 1974, was to have starred Jeanne Moreau. Because of film industry problems pursuant to the trade unions" contract raises, due early in 1978, it was contractually imperative that I have the script completed by the end of October. I was not able to meet that deadline.
The short story from which the screenplay was to have been expanded, was a fantasy based on the real-life murder of a woman named Catherine Genovese, in the section of Queens called Kew Gardens, in 1964.
At the time, the killing made worldwide headlines chiefly because it had been witnessed by thirty-eight neighbors of Kitty Genovese, not one of whom made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police. (One man, in fact, viewing the murder from his third-floor apartment window, stated later that he rushed to turn up his radio so he wouldn"t hear the woman"s screams.) The excuse offered by almost every one of those wretched thirty-eight witnesses, was that "I didn"t want to get involved." It became an emblematic incident of an alienated society, and entire books have been written on the phenomenon.
(And for those who have sought to dismiss the incident as an isolated aberration of its time, here are excerpts from the opening paragraphs of a New York Times article dated Friday, December 28th, 1974: "While at least one neighbor heard her dying screams and did nothing, a 25-year-old model was beaten to death early Christmas morning in her Kew Gardens, Queens, apartment, which virtually overlooks the scene of the murder of Catherine Genovese 10 years ago . . . The 10-story red brick building where the latest murder occurred was the residence of many of the 38 witnesses who heard or saw the knife-slaying of Miss Genovese on the street below in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964, and neither called the police nor took any other action . . . . The latest victim, Sandra Zahler of 8267 Austin Street, was apparently slain about 3:20 AM Wednesday, when a woman in the next-door apartment on the fifth floor said she heard screams and the sounds of a fierce struggle . . . . Madeline Hartmann, who lives in the apartment next to the victim"s and who recalled having heard the screams of Miss Genovese 10 years ago, told in an interview of having heard Miss Zahler scream and of other sounds of an apparent struggle . . . . While most of those who witnessed the murder of Miss Genovese have moved away from Kew Gardens, some because of negative publicity about their inaction, some still remain in the neighborhood and a few still live in the building where Miss Zahler died.") In an eerie way, the fantasy-horror explanation I presented in my story for the behavior of those thirty-eight people, was validated by the murder of the Zahler woman ten years later. In fact, Sandra Zahler might easily have been the real-life model for the heroine of "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," and the fate that befell her might as easily have come straight out of my fiction. (For those unfamiliar with the story, it can be found in my collections Deathbird Stories and last year"s The Essential Ellison, as well as in a number of anthologies including Best Detective Stories of the Year: 1974 and The Year"s Best Horror Stories, Series III, and the recent David Hartwell-edited anthology, The Dark Descent.) Neither in the nine years between the murder of Kitty Genovese and the writing of "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," nor in the fifteen years since its publication, did it ever occur to me that I would someday have to explain who Kitty Genovese was, why her death was (and remains) a modern, urban horror of the most paralyzing sort, or what it was about that slaying that so obsessed me that I would be driven to write a story that to this day frightens me no less than at the moment I completed it; a story that I think is the most chilling thing I"ve ever written.
I would have instantly dismissed such a silly thought. To forget Kitty Genovese and the cultural icon she became, would be as impossible as forgetting the mythic origins of Jack the Ripper, Dr. Crippen, Gilles de Rais, Sawney Beane, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald or John Dillinger. Nothing less than unthinkable!
But a terrible cultural amnesia a.s.sails us, and young people today seem to learn no history in their schools; and that which they learn they forget immediately after their spot quizzes. The Korean War is as misty in the public mind as the Wars of the Roses.
The National Endowment for the Humanities recently released a report mandated by Congress ent.i.tled American Memory, which indicates that while our students may be great at a.n.a.lyzing, contemplating, reasoning, in short, "thinking," their education has not given them very much to think about. Method, in our public schools and universities, has been emphasized over content. Teachers, themselves, are rewarded for "process" more than knowledge of anything in particular.
A survey of more than eight thousand seventeen-year-old Americans last Spring revealed that 68% had no idea in what half-century the American Civil War had taken place. 69% didn"t know what the Magna Carta was. Hardly any of them knew who Chaucer, Cervantes, Dante or Dostoevsky were. Many were dimly aware that Columbus is alleged to have discovered America first, but they didn"t have a clue in what year. History as a required subject has virtually vanished from school curricula, lumped in haphazardly as "Social Studies"; geography hasn"t been taught in many of our schools in years; English courses are transformed into something called "Language Arts"; and don"t even think about what vast gaps in historical and scientific knowledge are caused by the ever-present specter of the Fundamentalists.
According to Lynn Chancy, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, most elementary reading texts contain little literature, and instead of learning about George Washington, Joan of Arc or King Arthur, children are subjected to dry, contemporary prose aimed at teaching such skills as how to make out grocery lists, how to give change, and how to use a telephone book.
And even though I know all of the preceding to be tragically true, and probably woefully understated as to the real severity of the problem of widespread ignorance, it never occurred to me that I would have to explain who Kitty Genovese was.
But in the past six months I"ve received two or three letters from readers frightened and mesmerized by "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," asking me how I"d thought up such a scarifying idea. There was even a reader who wrote in to the Comic Buyer"s Guide, who had read the story, and had come across a variation on the Genovese slaying in some comic book or other, and wanted to know who had ripped off whom. (Fortunately, the editors of CBG, Don and Maggie Thompson, knew the referent, and they attempted to provide a background for that hapless product of the American Educational System.) And so, it is with heavy heart that I have prefaced the snippets of screenplay that follow with snippets of history not that old . . . bits of tragic real-life I never thought would grow dim in the minds of people who swore Kitty Genovese had not been murdered in vain. (And how many of you subscribe to The Underground Grammarian of R. Mitch.e.l.l? Which may seem to be a non sequitur, but if you go to your nearest library and check it out, you"ll see I"m only being purposefully obtuse in your best interests.) But in 1977, when Billy Friedkin brought me to Paris to turn "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" into a film of terror that spoke to the violence of cities, the omen that Kitty Genovese had become, an omen of slasher films we take for granted only a decade later, was as bright as the blood on a knife blade.
It"s a shame time constraints killed the project . . .
The production ent.i.ty that had bankrolled Friedkin"s deal, put me in breach; standard operating procedure. The film, therefore, would not be made. No one"s fault but mine . . . and time. With which I"ve had problems before. But . . .
While in Paris, I wrote three visual openings for the screenplay. They are sequences intended to set the tone for the film, this ugly, mean horror-fantasy about evil in big cities. If you look up the short story, then the subliminal thrust of these openings will link for you.
They are three very different openings, yet each one goes to the thematic core of the story. I have arranged them in order of preference, from least desirable to most appealing. They are offered as examples of the way in which a writer of books and stories can adapt him-or herself to writing for motion pictures.
It"s a matter of thinking visually.
Offered as addenda to these essays, in which I extoll the art and craft of screenwriting, for those few of you who may never have had the chance to enjoy the visual magic endemic to that special form of fantastic literature.
Offered as a sorta kinda bonus column, so you won"t feel cheated out of your chosen portion of Watching. And I would be less than forthright with you were I not to add this: Quite a few years ago I rancorously resigned from membership in Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization that I helped to found and which, in the capacity of its first Vice-President, I served. I resigned because the membership at large decided, in its wisdom, to drop the Nebula category of Best Dramatic Presentation.
I"ll not go into the affront to SFWA"s members who work in both film and books that this action proffered. Nor will I dwell on the horrors that resulted from SFWA having previously given Nebulas not to the author(s) of notable screenplays, but to the finished, collaborative films-and being p.i.s.sed-off when Woody Allen didn"t come to the Banquet to accept the award-rather than understanding that what scenarists do is different from what novelists do, and that the best screenplay category should have been judged not by a large membership to whom the scripts were unavailable, but by a blue ribbon panel changed from year to year, a panel that would scrutinize the written words. That"s really ancient history. So I won"t go into all that.
But this year, my screenplay based on Isaac Asimov"s I, Robot cycle of stories (an unproduced film that exists only as the written word) has garnered a number of recommendations for the Nebula in the category of Best Novel. (Well, the form of it may be different from the standard novel, but it is about 100,000 novel-length words; and it appeared as a serial in a compet.i.tor to this journal you now read; and the Nebula Awards Committee judged it eligible.) So for the first time, a work written to be filmed, rather than published between covers, has a chance to demonstrate to a frequently-irrational stick-in-the-mud const.i.tuency that-out of ignorance, I presume-their out of hand and off the wall dismissal of filmwriting has been a tunnel-visioned kind of sn.o.bbery as outdated and jejune as that of the land warfare experts who knew the Maginot Line was unbreachable, or the cavalry supporters who sneered at the possibility that air power would forever alter the forms of waging war. This effete dismissal of screen writing by a cadre of writers concretized in their thinking serves two non-productive ends: First, it perpetuates an almost hayseed att.i.tude, provincial and purblind; rooted in a fearfully uneducated perception of the film industry as Terra Incognita: a land of savages and arrivistes lying in wait for the unwary sf writer; slavering Philistines who debased and crushed the souls of Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West and William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Parker, and wasted their talent; a place of goofy non-writing in which no self-respecting "sci-fi guy" would deign to soil his/her pristine perfection. (A pristine perfection that is apparently unsullied by the penning of paperback adaptations of hack, commercial movies; cheap horror novels chiefly distinguished and distinguishable one from another by embossed foil covers featuring fangs dripping blood and demon children brandishing meat cleavers; Tolkien and Malory ripoffs awash with elfin creatures and swordspersons with unp.r.o.nounceable names forever on the road in search of mystic jewels, coronets of kingship or keys to alternate universes; and endless one-note ideas meretriciously bloated for the tawdriest commercial reasons into trilogy, quartet, s.e.xtet, octology, nonology and dekalogy. It escapes me how working in film could be any more witless or talent-bashing than what these literary elitists do for low advances and specious career motives.) But this reiteration of yokel mythology about Cloud Cuckoo Land spreads a miasma of trepidation and booga-booga boogeymen that deters good writers in our genre from attempting to work in the screenplay form. In this way, they are relegated to writing only in the printed media, and they are cut off not only from a salutary expansion of their talents-writing for film hones the visual sense better than any other exercise I"ve ever come across, in the way photography sharpens the eye of the painter-but from the vast sums of money and the pleasures of filming attendant on such projects.
As for Hollywood crushing the sensitive blossom of a writer"s abilities, "Pep" West wrote what was unarguably his finest novel, The Day of the Locust, during the five years in which he flourished as a successful studio scenarist, and would no doubt have continued his brilliant auctorial career had he not stupidly snuffed out his life (and that of his wife, Eileen McKinney) in a senseless car accident resulting from a penchant for speeding, which had caused rollovers and warnings from friends previously; Scott Fitzgerald"s "Pat Hobby" stories, written while he sank lower and lower in Hollywood due to alcoholism and the deteriorating mental condition of Zelda, may not be the apex of his writing (though they remain charmingly antic and mordant despite the pecksniffian cavils of quite another set of literary elitists), but it was writing done in Hollywood while he worked at the studios (ineptly, it turns out), and don"t forget he put together almost all of The Last Tyc.o.o.n, which many scholars contend would have been his most mature work, while being "destroyed" by Tinseltown; Faulkner"s studio work supported his wife, his family, his lover and himself while he turned out brilliant novels that were critically acclaimed, but were not bookstall runaways, and in that way his screen writing was like a day job, freeing him financially to indulge his muse as sybaritically as he wished in books.
As Saul Bellow has pointed out: "Writers are not necessarily corrupted by money. They are distracted-diverted to other avenues."
As living testimony to this, may I point out that whatever you, dear reader, think of my writing-pro or con-almost all of what I have done that is of worth has been done right here in Hollywood, where I have lived happily for twenty-six years. There is no deep secret to it, not for me, not for Fitzgerald, not for Michael Crichton or George R. R. Martin or for Richard Matheson. It is commonsense. If one retains a sense of one"s literary worth, and writes for film with the same punctiliousness brought to the books and stories, one can live decently and have all the time one wishes to write books that challenge and explore the limits of one"s talent . . . rather than signing on to do yet another furry-footed fantasy for a paperback publisher whose already overloaded schedule guarantees that the book it took you six months or a year to write will get a mingy six days of display and then be stripped and returned for credit, effectively putting a year of hard work out-of-print almost before it"s been published.
But because of the widespread Accepted Wisdom of writers who, in their imperial fiat, deigned to kill the Best Dramatic Presentation Nebula, many sf/ fantasy writers who could move comfortably and profitably between film and books look toward the West Coast as if it were the Bermuda Triangle.
Which brings me to the second non-productive aspect of the matter. Because the people who could and should be doing films of the fantastic are frightened away from the medium, the jobs fall into the clutches of hacks and parvenus who think an alien invasion is a fresh idea. And we all suffer. Because they write s.h.i.tty films.
The producers don"t know any better. They aren"t conversant with the fecundity of imagination regularly demonstrated in the genre, so they can"t be blamed for thinking the dusty old stuff they"re getting is fresh and innovative. Nor can they really be blamed for buying plagiaristic, watered-down ideas stolen from the best of our people (see column #30). They know no better.
By eschewing jobs in feature films, sf/fantasy writers abandon the field of creative battle to the hypesters and ex-talent agency mailroom boys who become "writers." And what results I review here regularly, with hysteria and disgust.
The days in which there were only Beaumont, Bloch, Matheson, Ellison, Gerrold, Crais and a few others writing films, are gone. John Varley works here. So does George R. R. Martin. And Steven Barnes and John Shirley and Norman Spinrad and Thomas Disch (to greater or lesser degree of involvement), to name just a few.
With I, Robot a possibility for inclusion on the Nebula final ballot, the time is right to raise the question again: Why is screen writing not treated with equal dignity by SFWA?
Chances of its winning are infinitesimal, but I am, at this moment, inordinately proud to have a work in the scenario form even vying for a slot as Best Novel. It heartens my brother and sister writers in this genre who move between the two mediums. It seems there will always be those so limited in their perception of what is "appropriate" that the screenplay will be pooh-pooh"d-of the many letters received by the sf magazine that published I, Robot recently, there were the expected few that came from readers who said, "What is this? I don"t know how to read it," or "Why did you waste s.p.a.ce on a script . . . it was good, but it just ain"t like what you usually publish," and one can feel little more than sadness at readers who wear blinders-but movies are the popular medium in which outstanding work can be done (don"t get me onto tv, please!), and it"s twenty-five years past time that SFWA should be rewarding that excellence of craft seen by many more millions all over the world than ever read one of our short stories.
Which is not to say that working in Hollywood is free of angst or heartbreak or time-waste or horror. Probably no less of any of that than one finds in any industry. And heaven knows I"ve written about those horrors and inequities at tedious length in a hundred different forums. And may again, here in these pages. But I am not suggesting that every good writer of a page of prose chuck it all in New Jersey and rush to knock on doors at Universal. I am suggesting that careful, imaginative, worthy work is being done by many of SFWA"s writer-members in this dazzlingly inventive form, and it"s time those who sneer at film writing because of their own fears and limited abilities be countered by an equally vocal segment of the writing community raised in a later time that acknowledges the importance and seriousness of motion pictures as Art.
So, because I"m nuts about these snippets intended for "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," a film that was never made, and to get the dialogue going, I offer examples of script.
I talk a great deal about the script in these columns. I quote from Ring Lardner, Jr., who said: "No good film was ever made from a poor script." And I try to convince those of you who "can"t read this script stuff" and those of you who, like me, love movies, that without first the word, the directors and actors would stand there with their fingers up their noses. This, as palliative to the endless interviews with arrogant thespians who tell the Rex Reeds and Mary Harts of the world how they "rewrote the dialogue" right there on the set, the day they began to roll the cameras.
I have digressed wildly, for purpose, but at last, in three quick scenes, I offer you some direct evidence of where the vision comes from that results finally in a motion picture. It comes from the writer. And the better the writers available to know-nothing producers, the better will be the films we see, the movies I review here. In these three snippets the eye of the writer becomes the vision of the scenarist. They"re easy to read. Just let the inner eye see what the words tell you to see. Read and close your eyes and roll the cameras in your head. This isn"t work, it"s a paid vacation.
And no matter what those men and women who yell Action! try to con you into believing, they are afoot in the desert without the art and craft of the writer.
THE WHIMPER OF WHIPPED DOGS: Variation 1 FADE IN: 1 NEW YORK STREET-NIGHT Chill and damp. The pavements look as though they"re coated with fever-sweat. Fog and mist silently swirl and hang like torn lace in the air. An upper West Side sort of street with ancient light stanchions that cast dull illumination, fog-shrouded light, just enough to see vaguely, with halations around them.
CAMERA MOVES STEADILY down the street at waist height. Past withering brown-stones, battered garbage cans that are chained by their lids to iron fences, flaking stone stoops, steps leading down to bas.e.m.e.nt apartments, huge plastic bags of refuse at the curbs, cars parked almost one atop another. And all of it swathed in obscuring fog. CAMERA PANS LEFT as it CONTINUES MOVE IN and we see down a short throw of steps into a sub-street cul-de-sac entrance to an apartment. A man in shapeless clothes lies unmoving with his feet and legs aimed toward us. His head and shoulders below. Upside-down. One arm outflung. Head twisted at an unnatural angle. As though he fell backward down the stairs. Clearly dead, though we cannot see his face.
CAMERA SWINGS BACK and CONTINUES MOVING down the street with a smooth, casual movement. A woman lies dead in the gutter, face toward the curb so we cannot see her features, one arm bent up and lying on the sidewalk above her. CAMERA does not linger.
As CAMERA MOVES DOWN STREET toward the park and the river, seen vaguely through the trembling mist, we find ourselves looking for more bodies, but we cannot be certain if those two huddled shapes in the VW at the curb are dead; they are slumped forward on the dash but they might be just sleeping; that pile of rags at the mouth of the alley might be an old man with a battered hat jammed down on his dead face, but it could be just trash; and as we enter the small park ab.u.t.ting the drop to the Hudson River we see what could be a woman"s naked arm protruding from under a bush, but it might be only a dead branch. It might be.
But we know for certain that the man sitting on the bench is dead. His head hangs back as only a head with its throat cut can hang. At that awkward angle, arms out to the sides, legs spread, body braced against the bench. CAMERA SWINGS PAST and Pa.s.sES ON to HOLD the silent river, fog rising and tumbling. Then, out on the River, lonely and desperate, we HEAR the SOUND of a tug heading for the Narrows. Once, twice, distantly. Then silence again. The city is silent.
FADE TO BLACK And FADE OUT.
THE WHIMPER OF WHIPPED DOGS: Variation 2 FADE IN:.
1 RED FRAME-IN MAGMA POOL Around the CAMERA molten lava bubbles and seethes. No sound. High contrast. CAMERA BEGINS TO RISE up through the maelstrom. It does not tilt, but RISES VERTICALLY. It reaches the surface of the magma pool, breaks the tension and we see across the leaping, spitting surface. CAMERA CONTINUES RISING through steam in the chamber above the lava. To the dendritic stone of the cavern ceiling. CAMERA Pa.s.sES THROUGH, STILL RISING DISSOLVE THRU: 2 CAMERA RISING THRU ROCK-EFFECT Varying levels of light and dark, indicating stratification of rock. Through iron, mica schist, diatomaceous earth, layers of roiling oil, feldspar, marble, sparkling levels of gold, diamonds, phosphates, solid granite, up and up.
DISSOLVE THRU TO: 3 CAMERA IN SOIL-EFFECT RISING SMOOTHLY as we view it in the manner of someone in an elevator sees floor after floor dropping past. Up through rock and soil to empty s.p.a.ces, through and up to hard-packed sub-soil, concrete slabbing, coils and snakes of cable, electrical conduit, pipes. Up past them through metal sheathing, into flowing water-a sewer system. CAMERA RISES to feature a metal ladder used by maintenance crews. Up to the ladder to a grating above as we DISSOLVE THRU: 4 STREET-NIGHT CAMERA RISES up out of the sewer grating to HOLD for a beat the silent night street of New York. SHOOT THE LENGTH of the street in fog and rain. CAMERA CONTINUES to RISE after beat; TILT CAMERA UP to feature the huge and silent monoliths of incredibly tall buildings that close in overhead.
HOLD the ominous leaning structures as the clouds tear apart for a moment and the single white eye of the Moon is seen. In the b.g. DISTANCE we HEAR the SOUND of dogs crying, as though they are being beaten. Not loud. We may not hear it at all. Then the clouds close over again, the Moon is gone, and the fog swirls in to FILL FRAME.
FRAME TO BLACK.
THE WHIMPER OF WHIPPED DOGS: Variation 3 FADE IN:.
1 SHOT ACROSS WATER-NIGHT Dark, slick water. Oily. CAMERA MOVES IN just above the softly undulating surface. An occasional silvered flash across a gentle swell, as of moonlight skimming into darkness. Fog rolls across the lens. CAMERA IN STEADILY toward a ma.s.sive throw of land that rises up in b.g. We can make out nothing but the gray shape moving towards us.
SLOW STEADY MOVE IN across the water till we perceive we are beaching on an island. Fog rolls up the naked beach. CAMERA IN to climb the beach and MOVES IN through darkness across low dunes. Now something rises up through the darkness. Tall. CAMERA KEEPS MOVING in on the shape. It is an Easter Island menhir. One of the great stone faces of antiquity. Silence.
CAMERA ANGLES SMOOTHLY AROUND the statue and goes past. Across the dead island to another head. And past to another. And another. To the largest of them. CAMERA TILTS DOWN and MOVES IN for EXTREME CLOSEUP through the roiling fog of the ashy ground.
HOLD EXTREME CLOSEUP of a bright, clean very modern knife lying in the sandy ash at the foot of the menhir. Again, a brief flash of silver light, this time across the blade-as if the moon had hurled one single beam through the clouds and the fog.
Then a drop of water strikes the knife blade. Then a drop of water dimples the sand beside it. Then another. Then it begins to rain steadily. The knife sinks slowly into the rain-soaked absorbent ash and sand, and as its haft goes under, the fog closes down, swirls, and FILLS FRAME.
CAMERA HOLDS on fog was we HEAR in the b.g. DISTANCE the SOUND of a ululating siren: an ambulance, a police car perhaps, a truck carrying people to ovens; we cannot quite place it. It recedes and SILENCE resumes.
FADE TO BLACK.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / June 1988 INSTALLMENT 30:.