Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  But if the foregoing produce hilo because of their rarity, not even a hiccup is produced by the daily thefts in the worlds of television and motion pictures. It is so common, this thuggish misappropriation of other's stories—both produced and in raw manuscript form—that when Ben Bova and I won our plagiarism suit against ABC-TV and Paramount in 1980, both the media and industry were astonished that someone had actually pursued such a pilferage beyond the pro forma out-of-court, keep-your-mouth-shut, take-the-money-and-scamper cash settlement (SCI-FI WRITERS WIN $337,000 IN PLAGIARISM SUIT! said the front page of the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner with a word-choice that made my toenails ache).

  It is no less than institutionalized behavior; no more needful of exculpation, in the larcenous souls of these dandiprats, than is the gnawing of long pig off a femur in the view of a cannibal. How to explain it . . . in terms a rational, ethical human being can comprehend . . . this singularly irrational and unethical behavior . . . how to explain it . . .

  Perhaps this:

  I have written the anecdote elsewhere, but I cannot remember just where. Don't stop me if you've heard this one before, I'm on a roll.

  Two hundred thousand years ago, when I was youngish in the movie business, I was called in to the offices of a producer who had been on the Paramount lot forever. He made B films. Still does. Saw him on Entertainment Tonight just a few weeks ago. Must be older than Angkor Wat. You'd recognize the name. Anyway. He sat me down, and he ran the de rigueur chat, and then he puffed up and spread his petals like the Rafflesia microbilorum* and he told me he had the most sensational idea for a science fiction monster movie since Santa Claus conquered the Martians, and he wanted widdle ole me to write it. There was one of these at the end of his pitch:!

  *A stemless, leafless, parasitic plant of the genus Rafflesia, named after Sir T. Stamford Raffles, British East Indian administrator and founder (1819) of Singapore, who was largely responsible for the creation of Britain's Far Eastern empire; in honor of his discovery of this plant order during the period of his governorship of Java. The microbilorum is the largest-known rafflesiaceous plant of the genus, weighing 37 lbs. and a yard wide. Indigenous to the Malay Peninsula, it was first identified in central Sumatra by naturalist Arnold Newman, who reports that it takes the bud three years to develop, then it springs open in an instant with the hiss of a striking cobra. Open, it smells like rotten meat.

  "Delight me," I said, all aglow at the prospect of hearing a basic concept so effulgent in its fecundity that it would knock me ass over teakettle. And he grinned hugely, and he said:

  "Ta hell with all the giant ant movies, and the giant spider movies, and the giant leech movies! I already have the studio backing to produce the first giant locust movie!"

  A stemless, leafless, parasitic plant of the genus Rafflesia, named after Sir T. Stamford Raffles, British East Indian administrator and founder (1819) of Singapore, who was largely responsible for the creation of Britain's Far Eastern empire; in honor of his discovery of this plant order during the period of his governorship of Java. The microbilorum is the largest-known rafflesiaceous plant of the genus, weighing 37 lbs. and a yard wide. Indigenous to the Malay Peninsula, it was first identified in central Sumatra by naturalist Arnold Newman, who reports that it takes the bud three years to develop, then it springs open in an instant with the hiss of a striking cobra. Open, it smells like rotten meat.

  We then began, in those pre-Maddie&David days, to do Moonlighting stichomythia:

  "No," I said.

  "No?" he said.

  "No."

  "What, no?"

  "No, not possible."

  "What, not possible?"

  "Me writing such a dumb."

  "It's dumb?"

  "It is cataclysmically dumb."

  "Why, dumb?"

  "Look," I said, speaking slowly and making sure he was watching my lips, "there is this absolutely ironclad, irrevocable, no way to get around, under, over or through it rule in physics. It is called . . . " and I cut in the echo chamber effect to make sure he knew this was Big Stuff, " . . . THE SQUARE CUBE LAWahwahwahwah . . . "

  "Square Cube Law." He repeated it. Then again.

  "That's right. The Square Cube Law. And you know what the Square Cube Law of physics, that is the law of the universe, says?"

  "What does it say?"

  "It says that if you increase the size by squaring it, you cube the weight. Now. Do you know what that means in practical terms?"

  "No, I don't know what that means."

  "It means that if, say, you take the largest ant known, which is maybe a quarter of an inch long, and you blow it up a thousand times, which would make it something over twenty feet high . . . would that be a big enough ant for you . . . ?"

  "Locust."

  "Okay! Locust, fer chrissakes! Pretend the goddam locust is a quarter inch long and you make it a thousand times bigger. Is that a big enough locust for you?"

  "Could it be sixty feet?"

  "Please! Settle for twenty, just for the sake of discussion."

  "Okay, for this talk, twenty. But if we're gonna have a special effect that looks terrific on the screen, it really should be at least sixt—" He could see my eyes were rolling, and little bits of foam were flecking the corners of my mouth, so he hastily placated me.

  "Twenty is okay. Twenty is good."

  "Right. So now we have a twenty-foot-high locust. We have increased the size by a thousand times. But the Square Cube Law says the weight isn't merely squared, it's cubed . . . that means three times three times three . . . okay?"

  "If you say so."

  "I say so. The fuckin' Law says so! Which means the weight has been increased not a thousand times, but a million times. And since the ant or the locust or the katydid or whateverthehell it is, is only made out of balsa wood and crepe paper and held together by flour-and-water paste or maybe the bug world equivalent of Elmer's Glue, the whole damned thing won't be able to support its own weight, and it will come crashing down like the second week's receipts on a Jerry Lewis movie. Got it?"

  "Uh."

  "Okay. Let me quote to you from a great scientist, scholar, philosopher and very wealthy man (I threw in that last to get his attention) named L. Sprague de Camp. He said, simply, 'Every time you double the insect's dimensions, you increase its strength and the area of its breathing passages by four, but you multiply its mass by eight, so you can't enlarge him much before he can no longer move or breathe."

  "Oooooh."

  "Yeah. Oh. So you see, it's a dumb idea that won't work, even though a lot of dumb movies have been made that way, which was okay when people were stupid and believed the Earth was flat and you could sail over the edge, but not today when every kid wants to be an astronaut."

  So he thought about that for a few minutes, in silence. And then he brightened. He said, "So okay, I take your point. That's why I called you in. You're smart about this kind of stuff." (Little did he know I had to call Silverberg to get him to explain the damned Square Cube Law to me.) "So if you don't like that idea, take anyone of those up there . . . " And he pointed to a chifforobe in the corner, atop which sat, mildewing under a patina of dust and silverfish droppings, a stack of old Ziff-Davis pulp magazines. Amazing Stories, Fantastic Adventures, Giant Insect Tales. "Go through 'em. Take any idea you like. We'll make that one!"

  "Are you crazy?"

  "What, crazy?"

  "That's stealing! It's plagiarism!"

  "Who'll know?"

  "I'll know, you asshole!"

  "I don't have to listen to that kinda talk!"

  "You're right," I said, rising. "You don't." And I left.

  To this day, he doesn't realize he was suggesting something disreputable beyond the telling.

  And that is the attitude that prevails in Hollywood. Now do you understand?

  There is, in these people, the imbrication of arrogance and stupidity that is as impenetrable to ethic as an armadillo's hide. If they chance upon a concept that manag
es to penetrate, and they can identify it with some film already made that did big box-office, and if it is not so different that when they pitch it, the similarity to the successful former film escapes the studio boss or the network honcho, they will offer it as their own. That it came from some other creative source does not enter into their thinking. We'll change it, it'll work, they say. And those to whom they are pitching are equally as ignorant of sources, so they enter unwittingly into the conspiracy to steal.

  Which may or may not be what happened with The Running Man and The Hidden. But though we've drawn nearer to that door behind which lies a horror unspeakable, we will all have to wait till installment 31 for the conclusion of the thesis of Li'l White Lies. Which may not be a goddam LAW OF THE UNIVERSE but if it ain't, it oughtta be!

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / August 1988

  INSTALLMENT 31:

  In Which The LI'l White Lies Thesis (Part Three) Approaches A Nascent State, Approaches The Dreadful Door, And En Route Questions Meat Idolatry

  Being lied to. Selling inferior goods by duping us with assertions that said grubby goods have "phantom values" apart from what we see on the screen: The Emerald Forest supposedly based on a true story; Ladyhawke a retelling of medieval legends; Hangar 18 revealing suppressed Air Force knowledge of UFOs; lies, everyone of them. Lures, cynically dangled.

  Being lied to. Promoting films of rape, violence, ethical debasement, moral turpitude, inhuman behavior, sexism with prolonged graphic representations in adoring closeup, and then justifying it by wide-eyed explanation that "we show you this woman having an icepick driven into her eye to show you how much we disapprove of it." Exploitation, pandering to the debased nature of the contemporary audience, feeding the sickness. Rationalizing and justifying and excusing . . . with lies.

  Being lied to. Using the ignorance of the audience against itself. Telling us that by coloring stylish black-and-white films like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, they offer them to a generation of young viewers who won't go to a movie if it isn't in color. Denying to that generation the experience of seeing such objets d'art as they were intended to be seen. Producing by such corruption of the audience a self-fulfilling prophecy, by which the ignorant are kept ignorant . . . in the sense of uneducated.

  Being lied to. As we examined such misrepresentation last time, through the noxious practice of plagiarism. Parvenus and no-talents, rampant in the film industry, incapable of creating new dreams themselves, hungering for sinecures as directors and producers while condemning writers to the beanfield labor of actually doing the screenplay and then having it wrested from them so they can "reinterpret." Unabashedly stealing ideas and concepts and entire screenplays, recasting them in their own cliché-riddled manner, and sending them out to market, to an audience with either short memories or no memories. If you have seen the Clint Eastwood film Pale Rider and are not deeply infuriated at it . . . then you are the ignorant of whom I speak. And if you look bewildered at that: remark, and your attitude turns rancid against he who points out that you are cerebrose in this matter, then I suggest you go and rent videocassettes of that film and Shane. And if you do not perceive very quickly that Pale Rider is a shameless, awful ripoff of the A.B. Guthrie-Jack Sher adaptation of Jack Schaefer's exquisite novel (combined with a ripoff of the "ghost" element from the 1972 Eastwood vehicle High Plains Drifter, written by Ernest Tidyman), then you are dumber than I think. And you deserve no better than rudeness, because your ignorance only permits this evil to flourish.

  So let us consider two recent films that mayor may not be ripoffs of famous science fiction stories. Two films that did extremely well at the box office, and have been lauded as fresh and original ideas by critics utterly unaware of the vast body of sf material that has been fueling the engines of film thieves for fifty years. Two films that take the basic ideas already existent in sf stories, simplify them, render them in much cruder form, and deny to the original authors the ability ever to have their work translated to the screen.

  The first is The Running Man (Taft Entertainment/Keith Barish Productions) and the second is The Hidden (New Line Cinema).

  In the Los Angeles Daily News of 13 November 87, a gentleman named Michael Healy, who is identified as "Daily News Film Critic," says this of The Running Man:

  "Schwarzenegger stumbles and falls flat in this futuristic satire on TV game shows with a plot lifted from Richard Connell's story 'The Most Dangerous Game.' Stephen King did the lifting under the name Richard Bachman, and Steven de Souza turned it all into a screenplay about as original as a speech by Joe Biden."

  Close. Very close. And one must admire Mr. Healy for not only getting full writing credits into the first three paragraphs of his review—as opposed to most "film critics" who find it less of a strain on their limited intelligence to use the odious crush word "sci-fi" than to describe an individual film as what it is, without recourse to a demeaning neologism . . . and who ease that strain on their gray tapioca matter even more by pretending the director wrote the film, with never a scenarist credit to be found passim the review, much less a reference to the original source material—but Healy draws our applause for additionally noting the historical precedent for the plot. A film critic who not only reads (New Miracles! New Miracles!) but who has a sense of literary ebb and flow. And he's close, very close.

  Yes, the famous 1924 Connell short story (oft-refilmed) is certainly the master template for The Running Man, but it isn't the specific work pilfered. We come to Steven de Souza's ankyloglossial screenplay by way of the 1982 NAL paperback novel pseudonymously penned by Stephen King. And we come to Bachman's The Running Man by way of Robert Sheckley's famous short story "The Prize of Peril" (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1958). If you don't remember the yarn, go find it in Sheck's collections Store of Infinity, The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley, or anyone of several dozen anthologies in which it has been reprinted. It's about this guy who becomes an unwilling contestant on a nationally-obsessive tv program where you run and run and people try to kill you.

  It was the story that sparked the campus fad some years back, for hunter/victim games in which students stalked each other and "killed" each other with paint-squibs from toy guns. Which fad, in turn, sparked a dreadful movie titled Gotcha!

  When the Bachman book first appeared, it drew almost no attention, because no one knew it was Stephen behind the nom-de-plume. But when it came out, and prices for those four NAL throwaway adventure novels by "Bachman" went through the roof in antiquarian bookdealer catalogues that provide Colombian Gold-level fixes for King addicts, and NAL reissued the books in an omnibus volume, I received a call from Sheckley.

  "Have you read The Running Man?" he asked me.

  "Yes," I said.

  "Listen: I may be crazy," Sheck said, with considerable nervousness and more than a scintilla of reluctance to rush to judgment, "but do you see a lot of my story 'The Prize of Peril' in that book?"

  I said, "Yes, I see it as being damned nearly the same plot, done at length."

  A silence passed between us. A long silence, in which each of us tried to find a way to speak the unspeakable, to approach that dreadful door behind which lay the necessity to think the unthinkable. Finally, Bob said:

  "Well, what do you think?"

  And I said, very carefully, "I know Steve, and I know damned well he wouldn't steal. It's that simple. But Stephen has often said that he's been inspired by films and stories he's read years before, that slipped down into the back of his head. This might be one of those cases."

  Again a silence. And at last Sheckley asked, very hesitantly,

  "Do you think I should do something about this?"

  "I think you ought to talk to Stephen."

  What lay in the subtext of our conversation was the dire possibility that something would have to be done. As one who has been compelled to pursue legal means to redress the sins of plagiarism committed against me by film companies and TV networks, I was careful n
ot to put Sheckley in a state of paranoia about The Running Man. But talking to Stephen King seemed the correct way to go about it. Sheckley asked me if I'd call Steve and give him Bob's number, and ask if he'd call.

  I said I would; I called Steve and we talked; and he said he remembered reading "The Prize of Peril" years and years before; and he assured me he'd call Sheckley to work it out.

  That call transpired, and Sheckley later told me he was satisfied with King's open remarks. The sense I got from what Sheck said, was that Steve may well have dredged out of the mire of memory the basic plotline of "Prize of Peril," never remembering it as an actual reading experience but transforming it, as all writers do, into the self-generated conceit that was published as The Running Man.