Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  Yet when he and I share a judgment (which I find, to my astonishment and alarm, is almost always), Harlan approaches bull's-eye perspicacity. "2001 is a visually exciting, self-indulgent exercise . . . no story . . . no plot." And besides that, it's "seriously flawed."

  Because of the times, I must get political. When Harlan and I wrote our first movies at Paramount (the titles will remain shameless; Fifth Amendment), the studio was a quiet little village; only a couple of pictures were being made. The lot was a summer playground for two kids, Gregg Hawks and Nick Kirgo, who wandered through dark and empty soundstages while their fathers, Howard and George, labored on a film.

  Almost twenty-six years later, Paramount is doing record-making business. But some things, as Harlan points out, remain the same. The writer is still given the shortest shrift available, and since that era of benevolent paternalism, writers have had to strike four times (most recently six long months in 1988) to achieve any semblance of financial or creative progress. As president of the Writers Guild of America, west, I can testify to Harlan's unionist ardor (he's served two terms on the Board of Directors) and his devotion to the cause of his colleagues.

  Ellison boldly fights the writer's war. He reminds the reader that every film he reviews began with a blank page (is the truth a cliché?). His essays are celebrations of films and celebrations of screenwriters. When a picture fails, he does not (always) pin the rap on the director, the producer, the actors, the agents, the cinematographers, the studios, the best boy, the gaffer or the gofer. Every film is the writer's responsibility, his blame—and his triumph.

  The likes of Harlan Ellison rarely pass this way. Sometimes it is with great relief that I contemplate that fact. Yet, finally I understand that I, like all writers, must respond to his challenge, which is to do the best work we can. That is what these reviews are all about: people doing their best, trying to do their best, not doing their best. You're a hard man, Ellison. Don't ever change.

  George Kirgo (March 26, 1926–August 22, 2004), President, Writers Guild of America, west (1987–1991) CBS-TV film critic

  Scenarist of Redline 7000, Spinout, Don't Make Waves, Voices and television scripts ranging from The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Kraft Suspense Theater

  INTRODUCTION

  Crying "Water!" In A Crowded Theater

  PART ONE:

  In Which The Critic Blames It All On A Warped Childhood

  Of me, the question is often asked.

  Humphrey Bogart to John Derek in 1949's Knock on Any Door: "Where did you go wrong, kid?"

  Pat O'Brien to Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Bobby Jordan, Gabe Dell, Bernard Punsley and Huntz Hall in 1938's Angels with Dirty Faces: "Where did you kids go wrong?"

  Patricia Neal to Paul Newman in 1963's Hud: "Where did you go wrong?"

  Gazing on the imperfect handiwork, gibbering assistant Dwight Frye to Herr Doktor Victor F. in 1931's Frankenstein: "I don't want to second-guess you, Doc, but do you think it was smart to sew the left hand onto his forehead?"

  Having reached middle age and having made the journey having accrued a modest degree of fame, some might say celebrity, others might say noteworthiness or renown (not to mention the guy over there with the placard that says infamy), of me, the question is often asked: "Where did you go wrong, kid?"

  I take this opportunity to put the matter to rest. It cannot be blamed on my late mom and dad, Serita and Louis Laverne Ellison. As nice a pair of midwestern parents as one could hope to have had cleaning up after one's adolescence; they did the best they could, having birthed something that might better have starred in a Larry Cohen film. Opprobrium should not be visited on the many bigots, anti-Semites, dunderheads and random whelps who made my youth in Painesville, Ohio seem like the lost chapters of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling or The Sickness Unto Death. I survived their tender mercies with nothing more debilitating to show for it than a lifelong blood-drenched obsession for revenge. Responsibility should not be laid at the door of evil companions, drug addiction, rampant alcoholism or tertiary syphilis; nor that of mind-polluting pornography, prolonged exposure to strict religious training, the evils of the Big City or snug Jockey shorts. Where I went wrong, how I first flouted the rules, when I turned from the path of righteousness and became the case study before you today, redounds solely to the legendary animators Dave and Max Fleischer, and an obscure feature-length cartoon they made in 1941 titled Mr. Bug Goes to Town.

  Oh, yes, to be sure, there will be those among you on the jury who will scoff, sneer, and flick fish scales in demonstration of your rejection of this plea. Walk a mile in my snowshoes, I say, before you deal thus harshly with a poor, unfortunate symphoric nyctalopian, come at the dwindling twilight of his life to a state of repentance and hiatus hernia. Ah, you nullifidians, you!

  I tell you truly: it was Mr. Bug Goes to Town (seen once in a while in the Sunday morning kiddie TV ghetto as Hoppity Goes to Town, the British title), an animated entomological extravaganza recounting the angst-ridden travels and travails of a grasshopper and other anthropomorphized insects, that first warped a sweet, theretofore-angelic child. It happened, exactly and precisely, as burned forever in memory, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941. My seventh birthday. Stop building that gibbet for a minute, and I'll tell you.

  My grandparents on my mother's side—a pair of kindly sexagenarians only slightly less lovable than Burke & Hare—lived in that then-charming section of Cleveland Heights known as Coventry-Mayfield. (It was called thus, because it was the area where Coventry Road intersected with Mayfield. I mention this, a seemingly obvious dollop of minutiae, only for those of you who have grown to maturity in a time rife with such portmanteau words as Sea-Tac for an airport serving Seattle and Tacoma; Wiltern, a theater at the confluence of Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard; and Flojo, an apartment house owned by Florence and Joseph Ellenbogen; and other blendwords of this sort that form a part of the lingua non franca committed in America today.)

  Until the age of three or four or five, something like that, I had resided in a state of baby, right there, Coventry-Mayfield. But we had moved thirty miles northeast to the squalid hamlet of Painesville before I hit six, and every week or so visited Gramma Adele and Grampa Harry (who never, as best I recall, ever smiled at me save when they were doling out chicken beaks and feet onto my plate at the Passover seders I was compelled under pain of dismemberment to attend) who still lived on Hampshire Road in Cleveland. I looked on these visits with all the childlike joy one experiences at the prospect of a sigmoidoscopy. As I recall, I adopted a standard response, when alerted to an upcoming hegira to the Grandfolks Rosenthal, that involved threatening to slash my wrists with the rusty pin that backed my Official Lone Ranger pedometer.

  Nonetheless, with the sensitivity all parents demonstrate when their kids threaten to eat worms or hold their breath till they turn blue, I was schlepped to Cleveland regularly from Painesville and, when my parents went out for the evening, I was put to bed at the residence of The Ancient Jews from Hell, feigning sleep but lying alert for a sudden dive through a window at the first scent of beaks and feet.

  In that neighborhood a mere forty-eight years ago, just seven months before Pearl Harbor, there existed now-lost and barely recalled establishments whose names alone send a thrill through me even today: Coventry Drugs (where I bought my first issue of Street & Smith's Shadow magazine), Uberstine's Drug Store (where one could get three scoops of sherbet, all different flavors, in a cup cone, for 11¢), Benkowitz's Deli (in the days when the corn rye they used to make a combination corned beef and pastrami was so festooned with caraway seeds that one picked at one's teeth for six weeks thereafter) and . . .

  The Heights Theater.

  It was one of those small neighborhood cinemas built during the moviegoing explosion of the late Twenties/early Thirties. In retrospect, I know it was a modest house of movies, but it was glorious and gigantic to me at age seven. Out front the display windows held not only one-sheets and lobby cards in full color, but a
t least four scene cards in black and white from each and every film showing or coming. The ticket booth resembled a private stateroom on Cleopatra's barge, tenanted (as I recall) by a young woman so gorgeous and platinum blonde that merely laying down a dime for a ducat became an act of sexual congress intense enough to send the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart to the eighth and innermost circle of Dante's inferno. The candy counter traded in ambrosia and nectar, Chuckles and Forever Yours, popcorn freshly erupted every half hour and slathered with real butter. The scent of it could have distracted warring armies.

  And the seats . . . and the usherettes . . . and the screen . . . and the ceiling mural . . . oh, how I loved that movie house, as I loved the Lyric and the Utopia and the RKO Palace . . .

  Going to the movies was all the books in the library at once. It was an event. Even having to go in the company of one's parents was something Halliburton would chronicle. And going alone . . . ! To be permitted to venture forth toward that mystic shrine all alone, pocket jingling with dime for ticket and three nickels for candy and popcorn; to know one could go into the Men's Room and not have to accompany one's mother into the Women's (oh god the humiliation); to select a seat way down front that produced a headache and neck-strain guaranteed to keep the Mayo Clinic solvent for three generations, a seat so far down front that one's parents would threaten you with having to cut the grass for a month if one didn't sit back in the middle "where any normal person can see."

  Going to the movies alone was exciting; it was dangerous; it was, aw hell, it was Grown Up! And that was only for the Saturday matinee. But to go to a movie alone at night . . . !

  Herman Kahn tagged it. Thinking about the Unthinkable.

  Thus it came to pass, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941, that my parents hied me to Cleveland. On my birthday! On my bloody canyoubelieveit goddam birthday!. Of all days to have to go to Cleveland. But wait! Can it be? Could the universe have taken a nanoinstant from its rigorous schedule of creating galaxies and hedgehogs, pulsars and pips in oranges, to say, "Aw, what the hell," and to proffer a respite in the pissrain that is s.o.p. for little kids? Could it be that I would find myself only three blocks away from the mysterious and glamorous Heights Theater on the exact specific day of my birthday?

  For this was the jewel, my friends:

  It was the policy of the beloved Heights Theater to provide free admission (let me rephrase that: FREE!!!ADMISSION!!!) for any child previously signed up on that date as his natal designation.

  It had never happened before. I'd always been in Painesville on May 27th. I'd often thought wistfully of being in Cleveland on my birthday, of sauntering up to the Heights Theater and saying, "Ellison's the name, birthday's m'game." And they would lift up the big register wherein were listed all the fortunate kiddies who lived within a reasonable distance of the Heights, whose birthdays entitled them to a free movie, and they would smile and say, "Harlan Ellison. Yes, here you are. Do, please enter, as our guest; and would you like a complimentary bag of our finest popcorn, it's the fragrant 5:30 pressing, from the sunny side of the machine." And the assistant manager in his impeccable tux, and a coltish gamine of an usherette in her livery, would march me down to the seat right up under the screen, and bid me enjoy myself in extremis.

  I could not believe my good fortune.

  So when we hit that Slough of Despond called Gramma's House (formerly tenanted by the Ushers), I rummaged about till I found a newspaper, and checked what was playing at the Heights.

  Be still my heart!

  It might have been a grownup's movie. It might have been A Woman's Face, with a script by Donald Ogden Stewart, directed by George Cukor, starring Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas and Conrad Veidt; it might have been Tobacco Road, written by Nunnally Johnson from Erskine Caldwell's novel, directed by John Ford, and starring Gene Tierney, Marjorie Rambeau, Charley Grapewin and Dana Andrews; it might have been Ziegfeld Girl with that great Busby Berkeley "You Stepped Out of a Dream" dance number, and Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr and Judy Garland and Jimmy Stewart; it might have been Citizen Kane or Shaw's Major Barbara with Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison; or Mary Astor and Bette Davis in The Great Lie; or Meet John Doe or Singapore Woman or The Lady Eve. And I wouldn't have been doing too badly with any of those—except maybe Singapore Woman which, though it featured Heather Angel, starred Brenda Marshall, whom I never could stand—because they are all films I came to love in later years. But they were grownups' movies. I was seven. Sitting through the antics of Edward Arnold or Henry Daniell or Eve Arden or Barbara Stanwyck at age seven would've been something I'd do—because it was a movie, because it was my birthday, because I'd be seeing a movie at night—but the worm would certainly have gnawed my apple. It might have been a forgettable night. But . . .

  Be still my heart!

  The film that was showing at the Heights Theater on my seventh birthday, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941, was a full-length animated feature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town, produced by Max Fleischer, who had earlier dazzled me with Gulliver's Travels and three double-length Popeye cartoons in which that greatest of all salts had met Sindbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba, directed by his brother, Dave Fleischer who would, within the year, knock my socks off with Superman cartoons that are spectacular even today, close on half a century later. The perfect movie for a birthday boy who, in that time of greater innocence, had seen the three Disney feature-lengths, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, and Pinocchio, and the Fleischer Bros.'s Gulliver's Travels, who was yet five months away from seeing Dumbo, who was living through the Golden Age of Animation, first-run, but didn't know it. The universe had selected the absolutely best choice for a movie to be seen at that special moment in my life. A nexus, a linch pin, a watershed; a turbid moment through which the dim future could be seen only vaguely; a branching of the path.

  We're talking here about an important moment, y'know?

  So I asked my parents, since they were going off to have dinner with friends, if they would drive me the few blocks to the Heights Theater, onaccounta it was my birthday and the Heights would let me in free onaccounta it was my birthday and they had this extra-special thing for kids who were having a birthday and once a year on their birthday they could see a movie for free and it was a cartoon movie, a special birthday coincidence treat that would mean a lot onaccounta it's my birth . . .

  It was dark outside already. It was evening. Which preceded night. I was seven years old. Go out at night, all alone, to sit in a movie theater by yourself, and how do you manage to come home those three deadly blocks, who'll come to get you, and what happens if you're kidnapped?

  I would have received a more kindly reception had I asked permission to go join the British forces defending the Suez Canal from Lieut. General Erwin Rommel's panzer Afrika Corps.

  It was decided on the spot, among my parents, grandparents and assorted relatives including Uncle Morrie, Aunt Babe, Aunt Alice and whoever Aunt Alice was dating at the time, that I would spend my birthday not in the animated embrace of the Fleischers and their gavotting grasshopper, but 'neath the sheets of the spare bedroom, trembling in expectation of the Lovecraftian horrors of beaks and feet.

  And so it came to pass that I was stripped to my underwear and placed in the bed, kissed goodnight at the fucking ridiculous hour of 6:00 (showtime was 7:00 at the Heights, the newspaper had advised), and urged to sleep tight with the usual admonition not to let the bedbugs bite. Bedbugs, hell, I thought: beaks and feet, beaks and feet! The door was closed, I was left in darkness in a house whose only other inhabitants were a pair of Russian immigrants whose grand-parently bodies had been taken over by Aliens from the Kid-Hating Planet.

  It was then, in that half hour between being relegated to my bed of pain, and the leavetaking of my parents, that I Went Wrong.

  Previously, I had been the very model of a Horatio Alger child. Goodhearted, free-spirited, clean and neat; the only kid of my acquaintance who did not step on anthills or tie tin cans to puppy dog tails. But at that instant, lying there musing
on the nature of the child-adult liaison, considering the state of the universe and only dimly beginning to understand the concept injustice . . . I was driven to a burgeoning sense of Self, and was stripped of my innocence, flensed of my trust in the omnipotence of adults. I Went Wrong.

  In the dark I slipped out of bed, found my clothes, got dressed, opened the bedroom window, climbed out and hung by my fingertips from the sill, dropped to the ground, and ran off into the night. It was my birthday, goddammit, and I was entitled to the free movie I'd been promised. It would be wasteful not to take advantage of the prize. Mr. Harlan Goes to Town!*

  *The aphorist Olin Miller has written: "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory." In the course of writing this bit of memoir, reference to the noted film critic and historian Leonard Maltin, and to a book on the Fleischers by Leslie Cabarga, made it clear that since Mr. Bug Goes to Town was not released till December 4th 1941, I could not possibly have seen it one hundred and ninety-two days earlier on May 27th. Nonetheless, memories of this pivotal incident in my otherwise stale, dull, and flatly uneventful life are blazingly clear. This happened before we went to war with Japan following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Don't tell me I'm getting senile, I don't want to hear it. The simple explanation that I saw the movie in May of 1942, on my eighth birthday, rather than my seventh, is ridiculous, Maltin! A first-run feature being shown five months after initial release in a time when they were making five hundred films a year and they had to change the bill at least three times a week?!? Not to mention, Leonard, that it's highly unlikely they'd be showing a cartoon feature, no matter how "adult," at an evening performance on a Wednesday night five months later! No, I think not. Rather, it falls to me—however reluctantly and with apologies to all those whose historical writings must now be cast into question—to reveal a hitherto-undiscovered conspiracy on the part of Maltin, Cabarga, Time magazine, The New York Times, Walt Lee, Paramount Pictures, Photoplay and your mother and father to wipe out an entire year in the early Forties, for what nefarious reason I cannot even guess. I find this all terribly disturbing, of course, but if it comes to a point of doubting What I Know To Be True, from the source of flawless recollection, as opposed to the alleged "evidence" of recorded history, well, my example is set by all those Fundamentalist and Charismatic Christians who know damned well that the time and date of The Creation by God was 4004 B.C., on the 26th of October, at exactly 9:00 A.M., as calculated by Archbishop Ussher in 1654, despite all the bogus "evidence" of geology, astronomy, paleontology, zoology, DNA-tracing, archaeology, radiocarbon dating, uranium and thorium soil-decay calculations, not to mention X-ray microscopy in 3-D, all of which implacably attest to the age of the Earth as 4.55 billion years, not to mention the thousands of rational men and women who come forward each week to attest to having been kidnapped by aliens who sucked out their brains and replaced the gray matter with crunchy peanut butter (pant! gasp!), yet . . . in the face of all that do you think I'm going to believe I've made a mistake? Not on your tintype. Besides, I slept late on the 26th and didn't start the job till almost ten o'clock.