Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  The audience is larger than ever, but it's also dumber than ever. Attendance at movie theaters continues to grow by lemming-horde increments: up 7% in 1987 over 1986; according to the U.S. Bureau of Census, as of 1 January 1989, we are more than 250 million strong, and there's a VCR in more than 55% of American homes; theatrical business accounted for 42% of the movie industry's total revenues in 1987, but with 40,000 titles available on videocassette, with more than five hundred new and vintage titles issued monthly, the 39% of the industry's total revenues that is represented by six billion dollars in total video stores' volume tells us the teeter-totter is about to tip, if it hasn't already. And the obvious conclusion we can draw from these statistics plus the evidence of our own experiences?

  The audience is getting more illiterate.

  (What's that? How does he come to figure such a thing?)

  The focus groups and demographic studies all seem to agree: the audience for more difficult films, for subtler and more specialized films, is still extant. But it isn't going to theaters to satisfy its movie hungers. It's staying home, renting the films for enjoyment in convenience, safety and retention of pocket money.

  The older filmgoer, the aficionado of foreign and experimental productions, is getting a full menu of movies on cable and through the good offices of the household VCRs. If one wishes to see either the original 1973 French charmer La Bonne Année, starring Lino Ventura and directed by Claude Lelouch, or its equally charming 1987 American remake Happy New Year (with Peter Falk in his finest performance since his 1960 role as Abe "Kid Twist" Reles in Murder, Inc. and the 1962 Dick Powell Theater presentation of Richard Alan Simmons's "The Price of Tomatoes," for which Falk won his first Emmy), one need only visit a well-stocked video outlet or wait a few days for both to appear on HBO. One does not go to the nearest multiplex.

  A "little" film like Happy New Year, starring an actor best known to the immature film audience as Columbo—five-finger thespic exercises ever-available in tv syndication or in current blah ABC Mystery Movies—never had a chance in theaters. It sat on the shelf for a year before release, played the big screens for less than a week, and went straight to cable and cassette.

  Movie lovers looking for that kind of pleasant, but not box-office-busting, experience stay at home.

  So what part of our 250 million made up that 7% increase in theater attendance?

  Teenagers, tv zombies brainwashed by thunderbolt commercials saturating primetime, MTV drones who can't get enough Madonna or Prince on the small screen, knife-kill flick devotees, and baby-boom yuppies who have such a total ignorance of even recent history that they do not see how corrupt Mississippi Burning is.

  An audience that is, in large measure, cinematically ignorant. That does not resent bad and unnecessary remakes of D.O.A., The Razor's Edge, The Big Clock or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House because for a constituency that renews its cultural amnesia upon awakening every morning, nothing existed before this morning. An audience that, more and more, reads less and less; and thus is insensitive to plot development, the logics of story, complex characterization, or thematic subtext; an audience that judges a film's worth on how spectacular were the special effects.

  We don't need stats to bolster the above-stated ugly and Elitist position. Common sense and the evidence of our own observations when we venture out bravely to see a movie more than suffice. (In this collection of essays you will come across more than one recounting of Journeys Among the Trogs and Gargoyles. Compare them to your own experiences, and the case is made, no matter how egalitarian one wishes to be.)

  With an audience that has been chivvied and prodded and dulled to a point where the product need never rise above the level of merely competent, however ethically debased, there is no need to overachieve. If you can make millions, fer shur, with another Rambo or Rocky installment, if you can do the dance of the rolling gross by throwing away comedic talents like Whoopi Goldberg, John Candy, Steve Martin or Eddie Murphy in fluff that is as forgettable as a zit, if you can cobble up some clinker based on the current teen rage . . . why bother to risk those millions with a film like Happy New Year or Brazil?

  With handmaidens of hype like Entertainment Tonight or People magazine, abetted by Oprah, Geraldo, Letterman, Carson, Arsenio Hall and all the other "talk show" venues that push the devalued product, why buy into the delusions of Art and Creative Responsibility that are based on chance and danger and the likelihood of smearing the bottom line?

  Or, to quote another knowledgeable source: "It is not difficult to win the approval of a wide audience when one laughs at the same things, when one is sensitive to the same aspects of life, and moved by the same dramas. This complicity between certain creators and their audience has resulted in successful careers." Francois Truffaut, in the 1984 revised edition of his excellent study, Hitchcock.

  When I found that I had drifted into film criticism, almost without knowing it was happening, as purely a sidebar to my other writing, it became clear to me that my impossible mission, if I chose to accept it, was best summed in the words of Samuel Johnson when he wrote:

  " . . . illiterate writers will at one time or other, by publick infatuation, rise into renown, who, not knowing the original import of words, will use them with colloquial licentiousness, confound distinction, and forget propriety.

  "But if the changes that we fear be thus irresistable . . . it remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure."

  Now you know how I first went wrong and came to be one who cannot help but go against the flow, how that twisted view of the universe formed the philosophy of film criticism I've detailed here, and all that remains is to recount how I slid into writing about the art of cinema because of the basest motives in the history of movie reviewers. Complete with another long footnote.

  I'll try to make this fast.

  It was 1963. I'd arrived in Los Angeles on New Year's Day the year before, limping into the city in a battered Ford, with a number of encumbrances about which I've written elsewhere (see the introduction to my 1962 collection Ellison Wonderland if you cannot contain your morbid curiosity).

  This is the truth, no hyperbole: I had exactly ten cents in my pocket.

  The first year trying to break into filmwriting, even with substantial credits as a published author, was murder. I was always broke, had to write constantly, had to write some stuff that burst into flame and was reduced to ash eleven minutes after it was published, even found myself writing for Confidential, just to pay the $135 a month rent for the little treehouse on Bushrod Lane.

  In those halcyon days of television, five months before the September "new season" would premiere, each show would have a "cattle call" for freelance writers.

  Most series these days are written by a group of writers who are "on staff." They have such crazed titles as Story Consultant or Executive Creative Associate or simply Story Editor, but for the most part they just write the segments using the m.o. of a staff brainstorming session that cobbles up the story line by committee, and then the individual episodes are parceled out. The producers insist they get a greater uniformity in the work by this method . . . and I wouldn't doubt it.

  But there is very little freelance work left for the more than seven thousand members of the Writers Guild who, in former times, could get an entire year's worth of work in just three months of hustling. The shows used a wide variety of writers, not just the favorites they knew could meet their demands. And they found these other writers through use of the then-hated "cattle call."

  Today, the staff personnel spend as much of their time in the pits, rewriting the scripts of the few freelancers who—because of terms in the Writers Guild contract, the Minimum Basic Agreement—must be assigned a certain number of the available script assignments.

  As with any labor arrangement, there are positive and negative aspects to the current system, as there were with the routine in use in the '60s. More writers worked in those days, but the quality of t
he writing was frequently entry-level, because each writer would overcommit—the rest of the year was always catch-what-you-can—so they wrote as fast as they could, dashing from one cattle call to another. The word would go out to agents all over town, and special screenings of the pilot episode would be shown at one of the studio's little viewing rooms where producers looked at the previous days' shooting, what used to be called "the rushes," what were known in 1963 as "the dailies." These cattle calls ran in shifts, sometimes for as long as a week, with anywhere from ten to thirty writers at a time. Then would begin the feeding frenzy. Every writer would scramble from cattle call to cattle call, dreaming up ideas as quickly as possible, getting as many assignments of the available slots committed by the network as possible.

  In the Sixties, the networks gave orders for a lot more segments than these days. If you get a firm thirteen these days, you're considered a favorite of the Gods in the Tower. But in the Sixties it was matter-of-course for, say, NBC to give every show an order for 28, 30, 32, 35 segments (which meant that each show put into work between forty and fifty scripts, knowing some would fall out or prove otherwise unshootable).

  I got a call from Marty Shapiro in the early spring (or possibly Stu Robinson in those days, before Marty opened his own shop with Mark Lichtman, and was still with General Artists Corporation, now long defunct). Cattle call for a new show over at Four Star, being produced by Aaron Spelling. Spinoff from a popular segment of The Dick Powell Theater, starring Gene Barry as a millionaire police detective named Amos Burke. Go over and see the pilot on Thursday. I asked how many writers had been invited. Marty said it was an open call. So how many do you think? Maybe two or three hundred. How many slots open? They've already assigned a few to people who've worked for Spelling on other shows. So how many still open?

  Maybe ten.

  Great, I thought.

  So I went to the cattle call, and saw the pilot. Cute show. I knew I could write it. But, in truth, I'd arrived the year before and had only done two shows—an adaptation of my book Memos From Purgatory for the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and a half-hour syndicated script for Ripcord. I'd bombed out on everything else, and was really hustling. My credits were nominal, and my name was unknown. So I had to use cunning and duplicity.

  The modus operandi for these cattle calls, the Proper Way to Come On, was to wait till the screening ended, make all the pattycake remarks about how great it is and how it'll run for six years, and then have your agent call the next day for an appointment with the story editor, to whom you'd "pitch" an idea.

  As the lights came up, I spotted the guy who was doing the line producing for Spelling, a tall and distinguished, actually kindly-looking man, named Richard Newton. He had been a friend of Spelling's for years, all the way back to Texas, when Aaron and the late Carolyn Jones (who became Spelling's first wife) were all in college together. As everyone was shuffling in the seats, adjusting their eyes, Newton stepped to the front of the screening room and made a brief explanation about how the show would work: each segment would be titled "Who Killed—" followed by the name of the victim, as in "Who Killed Beau Sparrow?" or "Who Killed Avery Lord?" Each show would have half a dozen or more big name stars in cameo roles, to be shot all in one day. Each show would be sprightly, smart, urbane and filled with as many beautiful women as the scenarist could even semi-logically work into the plot. Oh, yeah, this was my kinda show.

  Richard Newton concluded his remarks and asked, in a way intended to be polite but not actually to encourage any real time-waste at that preliminary stage, "Are there any questions?"

  To which query I raised my hand.

  Newton warily nodded at me, and I said, "How about I kill Hugh Hefner for you? Did the cartoonist do it because his career had been stymied? Did the centerfold of the month do it because she'd had his illegitimate child? Or was it the swami, the blind hunchback they find sleeping in the press room, or the venal publisher's own mother?"

  Newton grinned at me and said, "Come on over to the office for a talk."

  I'd beaten out three hundred other writers, and went to work on Burke's Law. It was my breakthrough, and Richard Newton (who can be seen these days as the judge in the Matlock series) took me under his wing. We remain friends to this day and he was one of the few producers for whom I would work for nothing; writing for Richard was always fun and artistically rewarding.

  And that was because he was aware, right from the start, that he was dealing with a loonie.

  My first script, "Who Killed Alex Debbs?"—the murder of a publisher of men's magazines—was written almost in secret, kept from Aaron Spelling by Richard till it was finished. Richard and I worked together, writer and producer, like the Corsican Brothers, telepathic twins who understood each other and trusted each other implicitly, without having to talk about it. But Spelling, who found my way of working peculiar from that of the other writers whom he'd hired, kept asking Richard, "What's with this new kid, this Ellison? What's he up to?" And Richard would fend him off, saying, "Don't worry about it. I'm taking care of it. He's a terrific writer, just be patient, you'll see."

  And, because working with Richard Newton was a situation of trust and freedom, Aaron did see. "Who Killed Alex Debbs?" knocked his socks off to the extent that when it aired, Aaron threw one of those legendary Hollywood parties for its premiere. His enormous home in Beverly Hills was fitted out with a big tv set in every downstairs room, and he invited three hundred celebrities to see this first script by the kid he had "discovered."

  At that party Sandy Koufax and Sammy Davis, Jr. and Ann-Margret and Vincent Price and John Huston treated me as if I were one of their inner circle. I wasn't, of course; it was just a moment in my life when my path crossed theirs; but to one who was still incredibly naive about Hollywood Life, despite having run away from home at thirteen and having grown up on the road, despite having been married and divorced twice, despite having served two years in the Army . . . it was heart-stopping and dazzling.

  "Who Killed Alex Debbs?" featured cameo performances by John Ireland, Suzy Parker, Burgess Meredith, Arlene Dahl, Diana Dors, Jan Sterling and Sammy Davis, Jr. and it aired on a Friday night over ABC, October 25th, 1963.I watched in amazement as my work went out to all of America, and as the Great and the Near-Great and Those Who Hoped They Would Become Great praised me and shook my hand and told me I had a bright future in show biz. The following Sunday, the New York Times, reviewing the show, called it "a blissful melding of Noel Coward drawing-room drollery with Agatha Christie suspense." (Or words very similar. It's been twenty-six years, and though the clipping is in a scrapbook somewhere around here, I'll be damned if I'll spend a week hunting it down. But if I've misquoted, it's only a little, from dimmed memory. That's what the Times said, more of more than less. You can either trust me on this one, or go microfiche.)

  And Aaron Spelling decided I was to be the fair-haired boy. I descended, intensely but thankgoodness only briefly, into what I now refer to mordantly as my days of "going Hollywood." During that period I wrote for, and got to spend time with, genuine legends: Gloria Swanson, Charlie Ruggles, Buster Keaton, Wally Cox, Joan Blondell, Aldo Ray, Mickey Rooney, Rod Steiger and even Nina Foch. I went to Hollywood parties, I dined with celebrities and multimillionaires, I became involved with starlets, I went more than a little crazy. Even wound up married and divorced a third time, all in forty-five days. But that's another story.

  Yet it was during that period that I began writing film criticism, and (even as evil can come from good, good can come from evil) it was as a direct result of falling under Spelling's enchantment for the better part of a year.*

  *Strictly speaking, the assertion that I wrote no film comment prior to 1965 is untrue. Like everyone else, I had opinions on movies from the moment I left the Utopia Theater in Painesville, Ohio, on that Saturday afternoon when I first saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in re-release in 1940. (That same afternoon, I saw Victor Jory in the first chapter of The Shadow serial.) And so, as it was with
many of you, I wrote "movie reviews" for my high school newspaper and, not much later, "reviews of things seen and heard" for my fanzine Dimensions. Upon completion of the introduction to this book, it was pointed out to me by the indefatigable Gil Lamont, as editorial and copyediting amanuensis (and one strangely more familiar with my more obscure writings than even I), that I was leading astray the readers by suggesting that I had sprung full-blown as a film critic. That I was dissembling when I ignored the first sophomoric cinema scrawlings. Mr. Lamont reminded me that the demon bibliographer Leslie Kay Swigart had actually gone to Cleveland a number of years ago and, somehow, had managed to exhume copies of the East High Blue and Gold. He suggested that a sample of my pre-professional film comment ought to be included here, if for no other reason than to let a little air out of my sails. If you turn to Appendix A you will find republished for the first time, a brief insight by the then-seventeen-year-old Ellison dated 26 September 1951. In the spirit of mental health and a determination to hold onto whatever vestiges of credential are left to me after bowing to Mr. Lamont's chivvying, I have not included any other examples of post-zit journalism.