Planet of the Apes

by Rich Handley

  Taylor waved a liver-spotted hand, dismissing it. “Not important. His name was John Wayne. So Fort Wayne just came to me. We could change it to Old Hope.”

  Adam laughed. “Fort Wayne is just fine.”

  A young couple walked by. Both bowed their heads slightly toward Taylor, and he noticed it. “What was that?”

  “What was what?” Adam asked.

  “They don’t say hello anymore. They just sort of… I don’t know.”

  Adam reached out and put a gentle hand on his father’s shoulder. “They’re showing their respect.”

  Taylor wasn’t sure how he felt about that. He shook off his lethargy and sat up straighter.

  “When the first People came, I greeted every one with ‘Hello.’ No one could reply.”

  They were silent for a little while.

  “That must have been hard,” Adam finally said.

  A Younger, although he was now past middle-age with greying hair, strolled by.

  Taylor called out. “Hello!”

  The man was startled, as he was just beginning to do the head bow. He paused. “Hello, Taylor.”

  “Hmm,” Taylor said as the Younger continued on. “There are a lot of people here I don’t recognize. And where are all the People? I was walking around earlier and I didn’t see anyone from the beginning.”

  Adam didn’t answer, letting the warm sun lull his father back into a nap.

  * * *

  Several days later, Taylor woke in his Tree Home and heard voices. He just listened. Many were full of joy and happiness. Some with anger. But he simply laid his head back down and fell asleep.

  * * *

  A week later, Adam carried him down the ropes, much like Taylor had carried Nova’s body so many years ago. Adam took him to a very cozy hut built of stone, right next to the Pacing Place.

  The need to be up in a tree had passed so long ago, that Taylor had been the last.

  Taylor tried to remember who had been the last before him, but he couldn’t recall. He suddenly realized, looking across the Pacing Place, past the Fire Circle, that the rope ladder, which he’d once pulled up every night, was staked into the ground. It had been for a long, long time.

  * * *

  One day, Taylor remembered something. Knowing he had trouble keeping a remembering in his mind for very long, but that this was important, he took a piece of sharp wood and kept it pressed against his thigh, until Adam stopped by.

  “The Watch,” Taylor said.

  “The what?”

  “The Watch at the edge of the desert,” Taylor said. “It’s still being done, right?”

  Adam looked down. “We stopped that a long time ago, Father. No one saw the point.”

  “The apes.” And Taylor realized no Younger had ever seen an ape and none of the People could tell stories of them. Of what it had been like. No one could tell other than him.

  He promised himself he would remind them.

  * * *

  That evening, someone came to help him make the short walk from his hut to the Fire Circle, as someone came every evening. Looking around, even though his eyes were no longer astronaut-perfect, he could see there were faces reflecting the firelight as far back as there was light.

  Taylor had forgotten about the apes. He spoke of kings on horseback, and long arrows, much like the men used now. And long, green fields where men fought mighty battles. And how they lived in large castles. Machines that flew and people piloting them. Cities that towered into the sky. Even he, Taylor, no longer knew what was Fire Story and what was history.

  * * *

  One fine summer evening, in the midst of a Fire Story that meandered from piloting a spaceship to noble knights gathering at a table that was round, Taylor’s voice slowed. He hesitated and peered around the fire.

  “Nova? Nova?”

  Taylor slumped over in his chair and Adam was there, wrapping the old man in his arms and holding him like a child. Adam was weeping and all the faces around the fire became shiny with tears.

  Still holding his father’s body, Adam spoke out to the crowd. “Once upon a time, there was an astronaut named Taylor…”

  * * *

  Look behind the scenes of Escape from the Planet of the Apes in John Jackson Miller’s “Murderer’s Row,” and meet one of the many casualties of Cornelius’ and Zira’s brief yet poignant tour of the early 1970s…

  * * *

  MURDERERS’ ROW

  by

  JOHN JACKSON MILLER

  From: Franklin de Silva

  Hexagon Broadcasting Company, New York City

  To: Gary Luckman Lucky

  Star Productions, Hollywood

  Message:

  Apes exist, series required.

  That was how it started, seventeen years ago: with a telegram. Frank de Silva used to send a lot of them—I think maybe he thought he would save two cents versus a long-distance call. I wouldn’t put it past him. When you’re trying to run a television network out of a Gremlin hatchback, you’ve got to save a buck where you can.

  I kid.

  No, I don’t. Frank was that cheap.

  If I’m going to talk about all this, I’d better lay down some ground rules. First, don’t expect the quality you’ve come to expect from a Gary Luckman production. I’ve got a video camera set up in my wine cellar while I go through my old notes. No action scenes, no musical montage. Looking for a musical score? Tough. They can add that in post when I’m dead.

  Shouldn’t be too long a wait.

  Second, I think most of the people in the biz would appreciate it if I didn’t mention them by name in this thing, especially the way the world has gone. Cornelius and Zira—you just can’t talk about those two anymore, with good reason. I’m sure the folks I’m talking about don’t want to wind up getting a visit from Governor Breck’s people in the middle of the night, just because a dying man mentioned them and the Ape-onauts in the same sentence.

  Hell, they might even wind up with the rest of the naughty apes on Breck’s Achilles List. Show people don’t like being on lists. It’s a thing with us. Sure, if you were around in 1973, you’re probably going to have a good idea of who and what I’m talking about—but all the same, I’ll leave the names out of it where I can.

  But not yours, de Silva. Drop dead.

  Okay, so he sent me this telegram. To be honest, I didn’t know what the hell he meant. What did “apes exist” mean? I didn’t know until my secretary put on the TV and I saw the pictures from the commission. They don’t show that footage anymore, but nobody who had a tube could forget it. The Presidential Commission on the Alien Visitors, where two big chimpanzees, dressed up like they came from a sci-fi movie, started chattering in English. And I mean good English. I’ve had series stars that couldn’t speak that well. It was a big deal, let me tell you.

  Well, no, let them tell you. You can’t get this anymore, but I’ve got a copy of the report from the commission here.

  “Where we come from, apes talk and humans are dumb.” That’s Cornelius.

  “We came from your future.” That’s Zira.

  Boy, you want to talk about two sentences that changed everything? That’s what I heard when I turned on the set. Bigger than the moon landing, bigger than Taylor’s flight. I’m no historian, but even I could see that.

  As long as I’m talking to you like you’ve been living in a cave, I should tell you who I am. Gary Luckman was a big name in TV in the fifties: I wrote for the big classy dramas, the ones sponsored by products that wouldn’t kill you. Programs were more intelligent back then—back when owning a set was a luxury. Once aerials sprouted across the country like cornstalks, everything turned dippy and safe, and my kind of show died out.

  I hung around, though, and saw my chance to come back as a producer. I wanted to open a real writer’s shop, something to be proud of—and the early 1970s seemed the perfect time. The networks had started programming smarter stuff, whacking all the hillbilly shows in the process. One acto
r said they cancelled everything with a tree. Movies made for TV started getting good and getting ratings. And then you had the FCC—the Federal Communications Commission, back before Breck’s kind turned it into something else—which tried to gin up competition in programming by giving an hour of prime time back to the local stations. There were only three commercial nets buying shows—not counting de Silva’s alleged network—but there were about 900 local stations. That’s a lot of potential customers.

  So I figured I’d do well. But it all blew up, because of something the government and I didn’t figure on: that the affiliates were cheapskates, too. They filled that time with game shows, meaning I had to sell most of my shows to de Silva, whose Hexagon Broadcasting was the umpteenth attempt to compete with the Big Three. You’re forgiven if you don’t remember it—nobody remembers Dumont or Overmyer either. Let’s just say “Hex” was probably not the best nickname for a network.

  Anyway, we got in the office and called de Silva—saved him the trouble of reversing the charges. This picks up in the middle of the meeting, as transcribed by the lovely Sally Pewter, of the shorthand and short skirts:

  * * *

  FRANKLIN DE SILVA: Apes, Gary, apes. That’s where we want to be.

  GARY LUCKMAN: Space apes. Looks like you picked the wrong time to get out of sci-fi, Frank.

  MR. DE SILVA: Don’t start. I know what you’re trying to do. Target: Jupiter stays on hiatus. It’s not the answer.

  LUCKMAN: You were behind Target once. You were big on it during the space launches.

  MR. DE SILVA: And what happens after those ships rocket off never to return? No one cares after that. But one of the ships just did return, Gary—with astro-apes!

  LUCKMAN: I think they called them Ape-onauts. Doesn’t exactly trip from the tongue.

  MR. DE SILVA: Who cares what you call them?

  LUCKMAN: No, I get you. Hey, we could add apes to Target easy as pie. They won’t look as good, of course: costuming’s expensive. But if you just let us burn off the last six episodes, we can get back in there and—

  MR. DE SILVA: Will you stop it? I don’t give two hoots for your space bikini women, running around on Jupiter.

  LUCKMAN: On the moons. There’s no land on Jupiter.

  MR. DE SILVA: Wherever. What do you care? It’s all nonsense—just a way for you to put bimbos in blue body paint before nine on a Friday, when every teenage boy is watching. But this isn’t pretend anymore, Gary. This is real. I want Hexagon to be the apes network. I need programming.

  LUCKMAN: What, drama, comedy? Documentary?

  MR. DE SILVA: All of the above. I want hair coming out of everyone’s ears. You’re the one who wanted to lock in a long-term development deal with HBC, Gary. If you can’t get it to me, I’ll find someone else who will—in between talking to my lawyers.

  LUCKMAN: You’re a prince, Frank. We’ll get back to you.

  We had to send out for new desks after that call, because everyone in the office had put their head through theirs.

  Let me tell you about apes. They seem like such a good idea. Kids like them and they never hold you up for money. But they’re unpredictable little cusses. The chimp in those old jungle-man movies wouldn’t act unless his pet collie was on the set. In the fifties, there was a chimp on a morning news show, which should tell you how little news there was back then. He was as cranky as I would be at that hour.

  And just before the Ape-onauts arrived, one of the nets had a kiddie show with chimpanzee spies—and that turned out to be the most expensive Saturday-morning show to that time. You can pay the critter in bananas, but you’ve got to build so many props for them money just goes up in smoke.

  So there was not a sheaf of pitches sitting around with apes in them—and nothing we had in production had any, either. And de Silva wanted something yesterday.

  What we came up with in the first round was not my proudest moment. We had three pilots where the sets were still up at the studios for pickup shots. So we brought in some guys in gorilla suits—yes, I know the Ape-onauts weren’t gorillas—and shot some test footage, without changing the context.

  I was in Manhattan a week later to run them past the man. This one, I have on tape, thanks to Teddy Hyler, one of the management staffers I brought with me; he knew how easily de Silva forgot things. Picking up after we showed him what we had:

  * * *

  FRANKLIN DE SILVA: You two have lost your minds.

  GARY LUCKMAN: Tell us how you really feel, Frank.

  MR. DE SILVA: They look terrible. All awful. Am I to believe this one ape is a defense attorney?

  LUCKMAN: Actually, a prosecutor: Bobo for the State. We just switched him out for the actor. We figure on adding a backstory where another Ape-onaut ship lands near Harvard Law School.

  TEDDY HYLER: If we put the rocket down in the Charles River, we can use the existing Liberty 1 crash footage. (Pause.) We just have to pretend there’s a beach in Cambridge.

  MR. DE SILVA: Didn’t I just see you do that already in one of these?

  LUCKMAN: That was in the sci-fi series, Aquaborn. (Sound of papers shuffling.) The submarine that finds Atlantis—which is full of apes.

  MR. DE SILVA: Why in the world would apes be underwater?

  LUCKMAN: Well, that’s where the footage of Liberty 1 comes in. Our apes were headed there when they wound up on the shore. We can create a whole society for them.

  HYLER: Just be advised anything in water costs a lot.

  MR. DE SILVA: The whole thing’s all wet. And this other thing, with the woman?

  HYLER: That’s a movie of the week. It’s a serious look at what happens to a marriage when a man transforms into an ape.

  MR. DE SILVA: For the Love of Drogo. Wait—this thing sounds familiar.

  LUCKMAN: (Pause.) That’s because it had been a serious look at what happens to a marriage when a man reveals he’s got a gambling problem. We just put the ape in there. What do you want, Frank? We’ve had a week.

  MR. DE SILVA: I want what everyone else wants. I want Zero and Cordelia.

  LUCKMAN: You mean Zira and Cornelius?

  MR. DE SILVA: Whatever. People don’t want to see crappy monkey suits anymore. Not when they’ve seen the real thing.

  HYLER: Costuming like that’s going to break the bank. The mouth appliances alone will take hours to put in.

  MR. DE SILVA: Then get me the Ape-onauts themselves.

  LUCKMAN: (Pause.) You want us to put Cornelius and Zira in the shows?

  MR. DE SILVA: You’re damned right. Did you see Bill Bonds’ numbers from this weekend?

  LUCKMAN: Bonds? The Eyewitness News guy?

  MR. DE SILVA: Eyewitness News, Big News, whatever they’re calling it this week. Bonds had that egghead, that—

  HYLER: Hasslein. Victor Hasslein.

  MR. DE SILVA: Otto Hasslein. And they gave Doctor Otto Hasslein two hours to ramble on about the apes. It clobbered our whole slate—and it was just about the apes—they weren’t even in it! So I want you to get me the apes.

  HYLER: Get you—? Doesn’t the government have them?

  LUCKMAN: We’re not a news crew, Frank.

  MR. DE SILVA: And Hexagon doesn’t have a news department. That’s why I’m talking to you. Put them in something. Get them involved, bring them on board. We’ll make it an extravaganza, whatever it is. I’m talking about giving you Saturdays, a three-hour block.

  LUCKMAN: You can’t be— (overtalking)

  HYLER: You are aware one of your competitors owns Saturday?

  LUCKMAN: No kidding. Frank, that’s “Murderer’s Row.” Four of the best comedies ever put on television, followed by the best variety show in, what, a decade? You’re seriously going to counterprogram that?

  MR. DE SILVA: This network will not go dark one night of the week. I don’t care what what’s-her-name’s legs look like.

  HYLER: Cannon fodder. Anything against it’s cannon fodder.

  MR. DE SILVA: I’m telling you, it’ll work. We rer
an an old travelogue on baboons and got a nine rating and a twelve share. For anyone else, that stinks. For HBC, it’s a pulse. You get me the apes by the end of the month and we’ll make history.

  LUCKMAN: You want me to put a deal together with the Ape-onauts—by the end of the month? Are you trying to kill me?

  * * *

  Fact was, de Silva probably was trying to kill me, given those cheap cigars of his—though I have to admit I did the rest myself. That was another thing that had just happened on TV a couple years before the apes arrived—the government banned all cigarette ads. I’d have been better off if they’d done it in the fifties.

  Ah, well, the damage is done.

  Anyway, I flew back home to my ranch in Agoura Hills thinking I was trapped. I’d just bought the place, and now I didn’t have anything to sell. Calling my attorney to get me out of the development deal would break the company—but I didn’t see any other choice. I played with my dog, knocked back a scotch, lit a cigarette, and turned on the tube.

  What I saw saved me. Cornelius and Zira were all dressed up and getting the red-carpet treatment on the way to their new digs at the Beverly Wilshire. And then I spotted the entourage they were with—and the lovely young blonde who spoke with one of the reporters.

  Stevie Branton. While she was at UCLA, she’d done some work as an assistant to a wrangler on a safari adventure series I’d been showrunner for. Bright kid. I’d asked her out, but she wasn’t interested. This is the problem with marrying an actress: complete strangers pretty much know what your status is. Apparently she was working with Lewis Dixon, the zoo shrink who was the Ape-onauts’ unofficial spokesman and minder. I quickly got on the phone with the animal trainer, who still had her home number.

  I can’t say that she was thrilled to hear from me. Like the rest of humanity, she’d heard about my divorce and assumed that’s why I was calling. But I managed to wheedle my way into a get-together they were having the next night for Cornelius and Zira by promising I would make a big donation to the zoological society. For someone new to being near the center of attention, Stevie was pretty good about figuring out how to make use of it.