Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Years later, Dan Stolebarger—an Elder who was on the right side of the issue—described the situation for the Koinonia House website. “Ken was always on the cutting edge and eventually got involved in the ‘inner healing’ ministry. Because of his all-or-nothing approach, Ken took on some of the most needy and broken women in the church. He felt that if Jesus couldn’t heal and set these women free, then Christianity had ‘limits.’

  “Over the next few years, accusations concerning sexual misconduct began to surface. The situation became unbearable and Ken refused to walk away from this ministry . . . and the accusations of sexual misconduct kept coming. Because of Ken’s refusal to seek redemption and reconciliation, we had no other choice than to remove Ken from the Community and as pastor of the First Baptist Church of Chula Vista.”

  The scandal shattered the congregation, drove many to leave in protest, and led to the Community households being disbanded. Those who remained demanded accountability from Ken and the Elders who had looked the other way. Others urged forgiveness, but that required an acknowledgment of guilt and nobody was in a hurry to take responsibility for abusing the trust of the congregation.*

  I took no comfort from the implosion, deeply aware of the price paid by families that had been torn apart by Ken’s indiscretions and the tapestry of lies that followed.

  I should’ve listened to my gut, I thought. Never trust a father figure who doesn’t come from Krypton or Smallville.

  In May 1982 my grandmother passed away after an inch-by-inch battle against the death with which she had once so casually flirted. Always quick to act whenever somebody fell over dead, my father took the first plane to New Jersey to claim as much of her estate as possible. When he discovered that nearly all of it had been willed to my aunt Theresa, he went on a drunken rampage through Sophia’s house in the middle of the night, taking anything that wasn’t nailed down. My aunt always thought the midnight raid was less about collecting valuables and more about ensuring that certain parts of his past were eradicated.

  The day of Sophia’s funeral he showed up drunk and spoiling for a fight, pointing at the coffin and yelling “Whore!” until my aunt, Uncle Ted, and other mourners dogpiled him and propelled him out into the street.

  The most telling thing about my grandmother’s life and death is that she was not buried beside either of her husbands. Sophia (under her nickname Sophie) was interred at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery beside the artist Victor Rafael Rachwalski, the only man she ever truly loved.

  In February 1983 David Gritten left the Los Angeles Herald Examiner to become editor of TV-Cable Week, a new weekly magazine from TIME Inc. set to debut the following April as a competitor to TV Guide. David asked me to come along as a special correspondent, and though I wouldn’t be on a weekly salary, this time I’d be listed in the masthead. The HerEx brass were pissed at David’s departure, so going with him would close another market, but I’ve always put more value on the people I work with than the job, so I told David, “Where you go, I go.”

  I worked the celebrity beat, interviewing the Smothers Brothers one day, then flying to Mexico City the next to interview Sean Young during filming on David Lynch’s Dune. The competition for assignments was fierce, so I developed sources around Los Angeles who could tip me off to good stories. Among these was a contact in City Hall who called one day to say I should get down there at once. “We have to burn some old records because there’s no room to store them,” he said, “and I think you’ll be interested in one of them.”

  I zoomed down to City Hall as quickly as one can zoom when taking two buses from Glendale, and upon arriving was ushered into the archive room. On a table sat a bound book of transcripts containing testimony given before the Welfare Committee of the Los Angeles City Council in 1928 concerning a boy who had been reported missing, then found and returned to his mother, Christine Collins. Case closed. Except the police returned the wrong boy. Rather than admit their mistake, they committed her to an insane asylum to try and force her into accepting the imposter as her own.

  It was the goddamnedest story I’d ever come across.

  I wanted to copy some of the pages before they took the book away, but they cost twenty-five cents each and I only had five dollars, so I had to be strategic, choosing pages with names, dates, and references to other documents that would allow me to pick up the thread later. As I reread the copies on the bus ride back to Glendale it was obvious that this was a compelling story, but I had no idea what to do with it. Was it a novel? A series of articles? A script? The only way to find out was to keep digging up information until the structure of the story revealed itself. Even then, I knew the process would be a long one.

  How long, and how difficult, I would not fully grasp for quite some time.

  Over the next several months, David gave me as many assignments as he could spare, but it was a slow season for showbiz news. Rather than launch the magazine in the fall to coincide with the new season of TV shows, the brain trust at TIME Inc. had scheduled our premiere during the dog days of summer reruns, when even TV Guide saw its numbers drop. The low sales led to budget cuts, which meant fewer articles per month.

  But there was also some happy news: after collecting rejection slips for nearly ten years, one of my short stories, “A Last Testament for Nick and the Trooper,” was purchased by Charles L. Grant for his anthology Shadows 6. Since the first fiction sale is always the hardest, I took it as a sign that everything was going to work out.

  By this time you’d think I would know better.

  First ABC pulled the plug on Nucleus—Carl Sagan’s miniseries about atomic warfare—and suddenly Kathryn was out of a job, crashing a trajectory that would have made her an associate producer. She was fortunate enough to pick up a job as researcher for a one-shot TV program, but it was only a stopgap measure. The Complete Book of Scriptwriting was out at last, but I wouldn’t get any money from the sales for at least six months.

  Then in September David informed us that after a staggering investment of nearly $50 million, TIME was shutting down TV-Cable Week. The collapse was attributed to massive overhead, bad managerial decisions, and a war of attrition with TV Guide. Some even suggested that we had been quietly sandbagged by TIME’s other editorial divisions, such as People magazine, because we were competing with them for time, resources, and access to celebrities. The finger-pointing was loud, public, and ultimately pointless.

  As one of his last acts, David recommended me and several other writers to the editors at People, and I spent weeks slugging it out for assignments at staff meetings with infinitely more well-entrenched reporters. During one such gathering, I patiently awaited my turn as another reporter pitched a story about a new national rape hotline that had just opened.

  The female editor chairing the session considered this for a moment, then said, “Well, you know, rape’s been very good to us, but do you have a new angle on the rape thing?”

  On one level, her statement was understandable given the scandals and tabloid-style sex stories that drove sales of People magazine in the ’80s. But for me, hearing a woman say “rape’s been very good to us” was life-changing. I believe there is a trapdoor under all of us that has a single pin keeping it closed; it only takes one nudge, at the right time, to pop it open. With that comment, my pin was pushed, the trapdoor opened, and I fell through.

  When my turn came to pitch, I looked at the notes on my lap and said, “I don’t have anything that the others haven’t already covered.” It was a lie.

  You’re done, a familiar voice in my head whispered at me. Your career in journalism is over. Move on. Find something else to do. Find something clean.

  I took the elevator to the lobby, walked out, and never went back.

  After publishing roughly five hundred articles, columns, and reviews in six years, I was done with journalism. The decision was easy but the consequences were difficult. My modest income as a reporter had helped fill in the corners so we could almost make ends meet; abse
nt that, we were now perilously short on cash. My only other source of income was from the monthly Writer’s Digest column. Kathryn’s parents, Tom and Phyllis Drennan—lovely people who believed in me even when that belief seemed misplaced—helped out when they could, but they were retired pensioners of modest means and we didn’t want to be a burden.

  Unfazed by our predicament, and with her research job at an end, Kathryn took temp clerical work in what she described as “a windowless office putting numbers into tax forms on an old green-on-green computer for a chain-smoking boss who was the only other person in the office, a job I agreed to because I could get to it on the bus.” She also sold occasional articles of her own to Cat Fancy magazine, Profiles Magazine, SF Movieland, and the Foothill Leader newspaper. They didn’t pay much, but even that little bit helped us keep going. Through all the hard times, Kathryn never complained or asked me to get a “real” job rather than stay home writing. That is a singular accomplishment for anyone living with a writer, but it did nothing to diminish my distress at failing to look after her as she deserved. Every time it looked like things were going to work out, the universe smacked me in the face.

  I have to fix this, I thought every night. I have to write my way out of this, somehow.

  Chapter 20

  An Unexpected Journey to Toon-Town

  With our finances and options nearly exhausted, I decided to throw a Hail Mary. As a kid I used to get up early on Saturday mornings to watch Looney Tunes, The Flintstones, Jonny Quest, and other cartoon series without ever giving much thought to the idea that people actually wrote cartoons. Since moving to Los Angeles, however, I’d met a number of writers who worked for such animated series as Blackstar, Super Friends, The Smurfs, G.I. Joe, Fat Albert, and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe.

  I was actually quite fond of He-Man, a fantasy series from Filmation Studios. The hero, Prince Adam, would use a magic sword to transform into the heavily muscled title character. His greatest enemy was the bone-faced Skeletor, whose plans for world domination were never clearly defined. Despite the presence of a talking green tiger and a legless floating imp named Orko, the science fiction aspects of the show were unusually well thought out, which told me that somebody writing the show knew a lot about world-building.

  Animation studios at that time paid between eight hundred and one thousand dollars for a half-hour script. Selling even one would save us from disaster for a while, but I didn’t have an agent and knew nothing about animation writing. I’d never even seen an animation script, which has a very specific format, and when I asked some of the animation writers I knew for a sample they turned to vapor. Competition for assignments was fierce, so the idea of helping create a competitor was counterintuitive. After searching through every showbiz bookstore in Los Angeles I finally found a torn, dog-eared script for the 1979 animated Spider-Woman series. With that as a template I was able to finish a spec He-Man script in a few days.

  To find out who the script should be sent to, I called Filmation and told the receptionist I was returning a call from someone at the studio. “It was one of the producers, I think, but I didn’t catch the name before we were cut off, could you connect me to the right person?”

  “Well, there are only two producers here,” she said. “Lou Scheimer, the head of the studio, and Arthur Nadel, who’s producing the He-Man series.”

  “That must be the one,” I said. “The name sounded like Arthur but I wasn’t sure.”

  “So who should I say is returning the call?” she asked.

  I started to answer, then clicked the line mid-word to make it sound as though we got disconnected.

  Armed with a name and the address of the studio, I sent off the script with a release form from my scriptwriting book. It was a cold submission: no prior contact, no work experience, no references, and no agent to vouch for me. I couldn’t have done it more wrong if I’d set out with that goal in mind. When a week passed without word, I assumed that whoever opened the envelope took one look at the contents and tossed it in the trash.

  Then the phone rang, and the voice at the other end introduced himself as Arthur Nadel. “Listen,” he said, “I read your script, and it’s very good. Unfortunately, it’s too close to a story we’re already doing, so I’m afraid we can’t buy it.”

  I tried to say something intelligible, like I understand, I appreciate that you took the time to look at it . . .

  He kept going. “Anyway, you really seem to get our characters, so I was wondering if you could come in to pitch some more stories, see if we can get something going.”

  I met Arthur that Friday in Reseda at the industrial-looking Filmation Studios facility that had previously produced Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids, The Batman/Superman Hour, and the animated Star Trek series. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe had launched in September 1983 with sixty-five original half-hour episodes, and was Filmation’s first massive hit, airing domestically on 120 TV stations and syndicated overseas in over thirty countries.

  A tall man, thin and patrician, Arthur was intrigued by the fact that I’d previously been a journalist. The others working for him were either straight-up TV writers or had dabbled in prose fiction, and he thought that someone who had been a reporter could bring a fresh perspective to the show.*I had come armed with three story ideas. The first two were quickly shot down, but the third caught his attention. “Let’s start with that one,” he said. “We’ll put you to outline, and if that works, we’ll commission the script.”

  As he stood to shake my hand I kept thinking there had to be more hoops to jump through before he could just blithely say I had an assignment. But when his assistant began drawing up the paperwork, I finally allowed myself to believe this was actually happening.

  With bills overdue and no guarantee that this would go any further than the outline, I turned around the assignment in three days. Arthur was pleasantly surprised to get the material so quickly, and commissioned the script, which I delivered a week later. He had a few small notes but liked the script enough to put it into production. More than the script itself he liked that I had delivered the whole thing end to end in a third of the time taken by his other writers, many of whom were slow to deliver or had a habit of flaking out entirely, a complaint I’d heard since my time at the Daily Aztec. I explained that when you’re a reporter and a story breaks you can’t just wait around for the elusive Muse to show up. You sit down and get it done before another newspaper beats you to the punch. He liked that philosophy, and invited me to come back as soon as possible to pitch another story.

  A few days later, at a party attended by other animation writers, I mentioned that I’d sold a script for He-Man. Some of them were guardedly positive about the news while others were patronizing, almost to the pat-on-the-head level of, well, isn’t that nice, he sold a script. Even among those who congratulated me, the consensus seemed to be that I’d gotten lucky and this script was a one-off. But with sixty-five He-Man episodes to be produced Arthur quickly bought my next script, which I delivered on the same schedule, and asked for another.

  After turning in script number three, I met with Arthur to get his notes, then started to pitch some ideas for another story. He stopped me with a gesture. “Take a walk with me,” he said.

  We went down the street to get donuts and coffee from a food truck, making small talk along the way. He seemed curious to know more about me as a person, and my goals as a writer. I learned then that Arthur had been a TV producer for many decades, starting with The Rifleman in 1960. “So I’m pretty good at spotting writers,” he said, as if weighing some decision.

  He must’ve figured it out because as we headed back, he said, “I have some bad news. We’re out of money for freelance scripts, so we can’t afford to buy any more from you.”

  I nodded silently, accepting that the job had come to an end. I started to say “I’m just happy to have had the opportunity, it was a lot of fun—”

  Arthur kept going. “The point is, we can
’t afford to have you write more freelance scripts, but we can offer you a staff job if you’re interested. It pays six hundred dollars a week and your script fees are included in that salary, so there’s no over-and-above, you get paid the same amount regardless of how many scripts you write. The job’s yours if you want it.”

  As we walked inside I tried to play it cool as I said, “Yes, I’d love to come on staff,” but my heart was pounding.

  He pointed to a tiny room down the hall from his digs. “This will be your office. You start Monday.” Then he shook my hand and sent me on my way.

  I ran to the nearest pay phone* and called Kathryn, yelling the news so loudly I was sure I’d blow out my vocal cords. That night I told her to quit her temp job. For three years she had gone above and beyond the call of duty to buy me enough time for exactly this sort of thing to happen, and I was damned if I’d let her suffer one more day. “I give you my word that you will never again have to work in a windowless, airless, soul-killing office,” I said, “not now, not for the rest of your life.”