Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  Or in the words of Oscar Wilde: "Experience is the name everyone gives to his mistakes."

  Recently, however, as the needs of this column have demanded, I have been thrown into assorted liaisons with Universal. I as reviewer, they as hustlers of product they wish reviewed. This is a symbiotic relationship much like that melded from the association of the hippopotamus and the ox-pecker, or tick bird (Buphaginus Africanus).

  And I must confess I had forgotten how deranged things can get up there at the Black Tower. I select the word deranged from among the many words available to me, with great care. (There is a legend—certainly intended to be apocryphal—that in a manner similar to that of the apemen being brought to the Black Monolith in 2001 so they could touch it and have their intelligence raised, so it is that television producers are brought to the monolith of the Black Tower, they lay their hands upon it, and their intelligence is lowered.) Yes, I think deranged is the proper adjective; particularly when Universal makes a corporate decision to scramble all its eggs in one basket.

  Dune.

  The breath catches when the name is spoken. In the truest sense of the flack-artist's phrase, Dune has been one of the most eagerly-awaited sf films of all time. The publicity mill began its abrasive work against the public consciousness in 1969, just four years after the Chilton hardcover was published, combining the two serials John Campbell had first published as "Dune World" (1963–64) and "Prophet of Dune" (1965). Arthur Jacobs, who had produced for 20th Century Fox the enormously popular Planet of the Apes films and the financially-disastrous Dr. Dolittle, optioned the book for what would be considered a laughable sum in the light of today's knowledge that the Dune books have sold more than 15 million copies, not to mention that the current option prices even for trash bestsellers are now computed in numbers that could have wiped out the Holy Roman Empire's entire budget deficit. Jacobs died in 1973 and so did the first Dune film deal.

  Seven years later, surrealist director Alejandro Jodorowsky, Chilean-born, underground famous for El Topo—the weirdest "western" ever filmed if you agree that the concept of Jesus as Gunslinger do tend to diddle Jung's archetypal images more than somewhat—secured backing, optioned the book, wrote a script, and began hiring as astonishing an artistic braintrust as any filmmaker had ever assembled: British paperback cover artist Chris Foss, whose spaceships were painted as if they'd been sculpted out of Silly Putty; "Moebius," the Metal Hurlant comic artists whose distinctive style in such extended works as L'Homme Est-II Bon? (Is Man Good?), Cauchemar Blanc and Arzach had influenced an entire generation of Anglo-American illustrators; the Swiss designer H. R. Giger, who would later provide the psycho-sexually arresting look of Alien; Salvador Dali; Dan O'Bannon (Alien, Blue Thunder, Dark Star) and the nonpareil Ron Cobb. Two million dollars was spent just on salaries for the visionaries. I have seen some of Giger's bizarre, brilliant paintings for Jodorowsky's vision of Dune, and if aficionados of the novels have been less than overwhelmed by the eventually-filmed sandworms of Arrakis, I submit that their spines would have been pumped full of Freon had Giger's Arrakeen horror been realized.

  But by Christmas of 1975, the volatile combination of Jodorowsky, parvenu backers, erratic artists and banks wary of putting up a completion bond for the film exploded and two years' worth of planning, writing and preproduction went into the dumper. Lights dim; and the myth dozes.

  Leaves fly off the calendar. Seasons change. The Proscenium is cleared, flats are taken to storage, the cyclorama is repainted, and in 1978 a new cast of characters enters stage right as Dino De Laurentiis buys into the nightmare the Dune dream has become. And he opens the third act of the drama by commissioning Frank Herbert to write a new screenplay.

  Digression: in the twenty-two years I've spent working in the visual mediums of film and television, it has been made painfully clear to me that the "rule of thumb," widespread in the industry, that most writers of books and stories simply cannot write screenplays . . . is correct. Like most old saws, it is a bit of True Writ based solidly in history and personal experience. There is a reason Scott Fitzgerald was yoked with such as Charles Marquis Warren and Budd Schulberg on studio scriptwriting assignments.

  When I was working on Star Trek in 1966, I went out on the limb half a dozen times by urging Gene Roddenberry and then-story editor John D. F. Black to consider signing well-known sf authors to write segments. Six or eight were, in fact, hired. Of those who had no previous credits as scenarists, only two produced material that was eventually filmed. As for the others, some of the most respected names in the print medium: they just didn't have a clue. What they brought forth—even after extensive meetings and revisions and demonstrations of how a scene could be made to work, and finally even after-hours get-togethers in which scenes were actually rewritten for them—was pathetic.

  Even as there are apparatchiks of the Eastern Literary Establishment (a state of place and mind we who live here in literary Coventry t'other side of the Rockies are constantly assured by such as Barbara Epstein of The New York Review of Books and Mitchel Levitas of The New York Times Book Review is only a fevered conjuration of our California-vanilla paranoia) who believe that the presence of too much sunshine and an absence of a dozen police locks on the apartment door prevents us out here from writing Great Art, there are writers who smugly contend that writing for the screens, big and small, is merely a five-finger exercise any Real Writer can perform, a chore fit only for Hacks. I smile far more smugly than they, when I hear such twaddle. Let them try, I say; as you would to one of those culinary machos who announces at your favorite Thai or Tex-Mex restaurant that "there ain't a salsa living that's too hot for me!" Let them try, I say. Heh heh heh.

  Because for every William Goldman, William Faulkner or Robert Bloch who can swing both ways, book to film and back, there are thousands of narrative writers who have fruitlessly thumped their noggins against the enigma of how to write cinematically. It does not detract one iota from their craftsmanship in writing for print, but it ought to humble them summat when next they run a denigration ramadoola about those who can hear the song, those who can conjure the dream, those who can write words to be spoken and action to be actualized.

  Which is not to say that Frank Herbert ever manifested such snobbery. Nonetheless, his 175-page screenplay was, by all reports, utterly unworkable. Unshootable because of Frank's inability to prune it, trim it, straightline it, free it of the endless distractions of subplots and minutiae. End of digression.

  So Frank Herbert was taken off the project and De Laurentiis decided to go in another direction with the project. He opted for the method of hiring a highly visual director, and letting him find the proper scenarist. In 1979 Dino signed Ridley Scott. Alien was hot, and the English director seemed right for what was now considered an impossible project that would break the hearts of men or women no matter how tough and talented they might be. Ridley Scott went looking for writers.

  On Thursday, September 27th, 1979 Ridley Scott came for a breakfast meeting at my home and offered me the assignment to write Dune. He was very nice about it when I told him I would sooner spend my declining years vacationing on Devil's Island. Further, with the wisdom and foresight that has made me a Delphic legend in my own time, with the kind of bold extrapolative thinking personified by Charles H. Duell (who, as Commissioner of the U.S. Office of Patents in 1899, implored President William McKinley to abolish his office because, "Everything that can be invented has been invented"), I assured Scott that this was a book so complex and vast in scope that it never could be made, for anything under a hundred million dollars. And yet further, I said with sagacity, "Besides, who needs to see Dune when David Lean has already made Lawrence of Arabia? It's just King of Kings with sandworms. No," I said, vibrating with a richness of perspicacity unparalleled since Custer opined that he could kick the crap out of them redskins up there on the hill, "no, this is a fool's enterprise. There isn't a writer living or dead who could beat this project."

  Digression:
Scott said something remarkable that has stuck in my mind. He said, "The time is ripe for a John Ford of science fiction films. I'm going to be that director." And maybe he hasn't achieved that yet, but sooner the man who helmed Alien and Blade Runner and The Duellists than John Carpenter or George Lucas or Joe Dante. End of digression II.

  Though I like to think Ridley's spirit was crushed at not being able to suffer the torments of the damned by having had the bad sense to hire me, he pulled himself together like the special talent he is, and he hired Rudolph Wurlitzer.

  Wurlitzer's has been a strange filmwriting career.

  In April of 1971—just four months before the magazine would abandon the 10? × 13? bedsheet format it had held for 38 years—Esquire ran as its hot cover feature a screenplay titled Two-Lane Blacktop with the blurb READ IT FIRST! OUR NOMINATION FOR THE MOVIE OF THE YEAR! The screenplay was by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry.

  Well, the film dropped into an abyss and, though it has become something of a cult classic and is an interesting item because of a Warren Oates performance that is a killer, and some offbeat direction by Monte Hellman, not only wasn't it the movie of the year, it vanished without a plop! In the same year Wurlitzer's screenplay for a post-holocaust film called Glen and Randa was produced. Another miraculous non-event in cinema history though, again, an interesting piece of writing. Then in 1973 Sam Peckinpah directed Wurlitzer's gawdawful screenplay of Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, starring James Coburn and (wait for it) Kris Kristofferson. That one created its own black hole down which it plunged.

  And that was it. No other produced credits exist as of this writing for Wurlitzer. But in 1979 Ridley Scott put Rudy Wurlitzer to work. The most memorable aspect of the three drafts Wurlitzer wrote was his departure from the novel to include a relationship that poor, misguided Frank Herbert had overlooked: a sexual liaison between Paul Atreides and his mother, the Lady Jessica.

  Have you ever heard Frank Herbert bellow with rage?

  The Sargasso Sea came unblocked. Avalanches on the Siberian Peninsula. Magma solidified. The stars shook.

  By 1980 the deal was dead. Scott went on to Blade Runner, Wurlitzer went underground, and De Laurentiis went looking for new foot troops to throw into what was becoming the cinematic equivalent of Hitler's Russian campaign.

  Dune.

  The name had become legend. The bodies that lay in its sandworm track could have populated another whole film industry.

  But in 1981 De Laurentiis shocked even those of us who are beyond shock, by signing the director of Eraserhead and The Elephant Man, and David Lynch stepped up bravely to inhale them bullets.

  Four years later Dune was a reality, more than forty million dollars had been expended in its production, the world trembled at its imminent release, and in mere moments before it hit the screens of the world, everything hit the fans in that equally-fabled Black Tower where derangement is a way of life.

  And in the next issue I'll bring you full circle, as one with the Laocoönian serpent, to complete the bizarre story of Frank Herbert, Dune, De Laurentiis father and daughter, untold millions of dollars and lire, and the strange rituals of the priests of the Black Tower.

  Don't miss this one, kids. You'll boogie till you puke.

  PUBLIC NOTICE: Got a call today from my friend Bill Warren. Bill is a film critic, author of a nifty book on Fifties sf movies, and a cinema researcher who works with the Hollywood Film Archive. When it comes to movies, Bill's middle name is knowledgeable. Sometimes, amazingly, our opinions agree on a specific film. For years we have taken mutual pleasure in passionate arguments about the nature of movies. In my installment 7, in the time-honored tradition of gigging my chums, I took Bill's (and Steve Boyett's) name in vain. I said that these "alleged movie buffs" accepted a philosophy expressed by many duplicitous filmmakers that one should not take seriously the evil and gruesome aspects of some films because they were really only live action "cartoons." The word alleged was, of course, intended as goodnatured elbow-in-the-ribs hyperbole. That Bill and Steve have expressed to me their concurrence with the "don't take it seriously, it's just a cartoon" disclaimer is true. They've said it to me on a number of occasions, about a number of films. In the case of Bill, most recently in reference to Gremlins; Steve said it a short time ago about Buckaroo Banzai. But Bill called me in a state of upset today, to say I owe him an apology in the same public forum where I defamed him, in his view. He read my remarks in that column to say that he is a liar. I did not call Bill Warren a liar, nor anything even remotely like it. As far as I know, Bill Warren is not a liar. Nor was I calling Steve Boyett a liar. What I did say, is what I said; and it was intended to make my friends smile ruefully. But Bill feels I have done him a mischief. Because he is my friend, and because I respect him, I will apologize here in print, on the off-chance that someone else may have interpreted my remarks in a way I did not intend; but I apologize mostly because Bill is upset, and he is my friend. So one does this sort of thing for friends.

  But really, Bill, you shouldn't take it all so seriously: it was just a cartoon.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / June 1985

  INSTALLMENT 10:

  In Which The Fabled Black Tower Meets Dune With As Much Affection As Godzilla Met Ghidrah

  Synopsis of Part One of this thrilling essay:

  The critic attempted to establish, as philosophical background for weighty matters to be discussed in Part Two, that an ambience of derangement surrounds the milieu known as Universal Studios. Then, when the reader felt secure that the critic was going to discuss lunacy at the fabled Black Tower of Universal, he jerked them around again, as is his wont, by veering away in a (seemingly) unrelated digression that detailed the fifteen-year frustration of those who have attempted to bring Frank Herbert's Dune to the big screen. The critic made much of the expectations of the filmgoing audience; their Cheyne—Stokes respiration at the merest mention of the magic name Dune; the universal (though as we will see, not Universal) belief that this was one of the most mythic, most exciting, most eagerly-anticipated films of all time. Absolutely. Early on in Part One, the critic made this cryptic remark:

  "Yes, I think deranged is the proper adjective, particularly when Universal makes a corporate decision to scramble all its eggs in one basket. Dune."

  What could this have meant? At what dark secrets was the critic hinting? Did he, in fact, begin to tie together the disparate elements of Part One with this pair'o'paragraphs:

  "Four years later Dune was a reality; more than forty million dollars had been expended in its production; the world trembled at its imminent release; and in mere moments before it hit the screens of the world, everything hit the fans in that equally fabled Black Tower where derangement is a way of life.

  "And in the next issue I'll bring you full circle, as one with the Laocoonian serpent, to complete the bizarre story of Frank Herbert, Dune, De Laurentiis father and daughter, untold millions of dollars and lire, and the strange rituals of the priests of the Black Tower."

  Now go on, simply all atremble, to the thrilling Part Two!

  There will be mass screenings of Dune. There will be no mass screenings of Dune. There will be several sneak previews of Dune, but only on the West Coast. There will be sneak previews of Dune, but only in suburban New York and Connecticut. We are running screenings of Dune for the press at Universal only for the first two weeks in December, prior to the December 14th nationwide release. All press screenings of Dune have been canceled. A screening has been set up, but only those press representatives with specially-accepted credentials will be invited. The special press screening for an elite group has been canceled. Yes on Dune. No on Dune. Dune's in, Dune's out, surf's up!

  Those are notes from my log book of daily appointments. They begin in mid-November of last year, and they go right on through to December 12th when I actually got to see Dune.

  If the word deranged echoes in that paragraph of windy contradictions, well, who're ya gonna call, Ghostbus
ters?

  As I write this in March of 1985, Dune has come and gone, and you have very likely seen it. Some of you liked it; some of you didn't like it. Apparently, not one of you was satisfied.

  In the time-honored tradition of now-crepuscular fan pundits—so crapulously into their twilight years that their declamations no longer girn from the pages of know-it-all fanzines—every aficionado endowed with mouth has had his/her scream. It was too big. It wasn't enough. It left too much out. It included too much. It was simplistic. It was too convoluted. It was too serious. It wasn't serious enough. Dune's in, Dune's out, surf's up, shut your pie-hole!

  Can't anybody see there's something wrong here?

  Doesn't anybody else notice that otherwise rational critics have savaged Dune way the hell out of proportion to its weaknesses? Even Roger Ebert, former sf fan and good film observer, picked Dune as the worst film of the year. Ain't dat the same year that gave us Children of the Corn; Porky's II; Teachers; Gremlins; Body Double; Conan the Destroyer; Buckaroo Banzai; Streets of Fire; Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo; Sheena; Where the Boys Are; Up the Creek; Sahara; Tank; Red Dawn; Rhinestone; Hot Dog . . . The Movie; Angel; Bachelor Party; Bolero; Hardbodies, and Give My Regards to Broad Street? Ain't it dat same year?