Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  So you get an offer from somebody you never heard of (and with all due respect to Joe’s point, you probably never heard of them, even if they’re big-time and strictly legit, because you all stay totally unknowledgeable about who’s who in the film industry; another example of Terminal Provincialism; you know the name of every two-bit editorial twit at semi-moribund magazine markets that can pay you in peanuts, three months after publication, but you’re blissfully ignorant of the names of people who could pay off your mortgage or send your kids to college). But, anyhow, you get a letter or a phone call, from a stranger, who says, “We would like to take a two-year option, a 36 month option, a five year option, whatever, on your book, Don’t Step On My Hand, and we’ll offer…whatever.” Call it $500. “We’ll offer $500.” Okay, now Damon calls me and he says he had an offer for…God, I don’t remember what it was—The Rithian Terror or something like that. And these people had been nibbling around him for about a year but nothing was firm. He wanted to read me their offer. So I said read me their offer. And he read me their offer and it was ridiculous. I put him in touch with my agent, Martin Shapiro. Marty called these guys, as a favor to me. He checked them out first with the Motion Picture Producers Association, found out they were legit, but were kind of shaky. Then he called them up and he said here is what an acceptable option deal would be. And they realized they weren’t playing mumblety-peg with some amateur, that this was a writer with a knowledgeable Hollywood agent, and they started dealing. The last I heard, Marty got Damon a deal where Damon is getting $3000 for a six-month option on the material. If they can move it in six months, fine. If not, they lose it, or have to renegotiate and renew, otherwise Damon’s made three grand gravy money and he’ll get the property back, to option somewhere else. Nothing’s lost and he’s made the bread.

  All of this is very standard, yet somehow it seems bewildering to most of you who otherwise manage your business admirably. How odd! You spend all of your time worrying about the nits and clauses in paperback contracts where you’re getting $1500, but when there’s a marketplace offering you hundreds of thousands you don’t take the time to learn about it. And it’s so damned easy! There are copies of the Writers Guild Minimum Basic Agreement that you can get by simply writing to the Writers Guild in Los Angeles. They’ll send it to you for free, or maybe a couple of bucks. And if you read it, you’ll understand what your rights are; it’s that easy. It may not make you an instant millionaire, but at least you’ll have the real data on what kind of money is being spent out there.

  And getting into the Writers Guild is the easiest thing in the world. It’s a very inexpensive guild to belong to and it protects you in a thousand essential ways.

  I promise you, people, you will all, at one time or another…if you have any talent at all…be approached by Hollywood.

  How many of you in this room have been approached in some way for television or movies? 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11. Okay, that’s eleven of us right here, right now, in a room that’s only got thirty or forty people in it.

  Almost half of us here, right now; doesn’t that tell you that Hollywood’s maw is wide open. They’re voracious out there. They’re buying everything.†

  Coming up this next TV season, there will be something like thirteen hours of prime-time science fiction and fantasy television programmed.

  Who will write those segments?

  Well, it’s not going to be members of Science Fiction Writers of America because you people simply don’t know what’s going on! You don’t pay attention; you don’t look at the world around you pragmatically; you believe the myths and the bullshit and you refuse to train yourselves to work productively in the real world; you don’t take the time and trouble to find out how to write a script. So if somebody does get in touch with you…you wind up settling for peanuts, for option money, and they give the script assignment to some halfwitted script hack out there, and he gets the big money, and you spend the next twenty years of your life bitching about how lousy the movie version was, pissing and moaning about Hollywood and passing on more sour grapes mythology to other inept schmucks.

  JOE HALDEMAN: Harlan, is it myth-bullshit that we have to live out there in order to get in on all this, or is it true?

  ELLISON: It’s myth and reality. If you want to spend any substantial part of your year doing that kind of work, you have to live out there or you have to commute. Or you have to have a dynamite, aggressive Hollywood agent. Henry Slesar comes out for three months, gets all the work he wants and goes away. Larry McMurtry does the same thing. There are any number of writers who do that. They frequently establish a social relationship in Los Angeles so they can stay in somebody’s house for a week or two, or they find an inexpensive place to live, and they go around during pilot season when the new shows are handing out assignments.

  And you make yourself known, you get yourself an agent. It’s work. But the payoff, in terms of freedom, is fabulous. The payoff, in terms of buying time to write the books, is incredible. People out there who have done it are doing very, very well at it. It is an area of this business you dare not continue to ignore.

  TOM MONTELEONE: When is the best time of the year? What’s the pilot season?

  ELLISON: Pilot season: they give assignments along about May, June, July, August. Up to July is about right. They show the new pilots along about February, March, April, May. That’s when there’s nothing being bought. Then the pilots that are scuttled fall out. But during the Spring they firm up the schedules and start making series assignments. Some scripts don’t come through, they bomb out and those have to be assigned again…like in July, August, even as late as early September.

  Now, of course, it’s a different ball game in TV than it’s ever been before. It’s open season all the time…because they’ve got a Second Season, they’ve got a Third Season. Something dies, they kill it in two weeks, not two months as formerly, and they put in something else. Which means that there are deals going constantly. There are productions being put into work all the time. And movies for TV. And pilots. The dumbest ideas: they love them! They don’t know from anything! They want to do shit like The Man From Atlantis. You can’t believe how moronically uninformed they can be. But I’ll give you a classic example:

  A guy calls and he’s the head of development at CBS. He calls me up and he says come over to the Beverly Hills Hotel and let’s have breakfast or cocktails. I don’t drink, but I say I’ll have a cuppa coffee because I like to look at the hookers at the Beverly Hills Hotel who are the most elegant hookers in the world. And so I go over there and I sit and I listen to this shtumie, and he says “We got us a great idea and we want you to write it. It’s going to be a Saturday morning series but there’s a lot of bread in it and we want you to do it.” Already my eyeballs are rolling in my head, but it gets worse; I mean, he hasn’t even told me the idea yet! I find out first that the basic concept was devised by Larry Harmon. If you don’t know who Larry Harmon is, he’s the man who plays Bozo the Clown on television. Actually, it turns out that it wasn’t even quite Larry Harmon himself who thought it up. It was Larry Harmon’s seven-year-old son who came up with the idea. This CBS buffoon tells me it’s a terrific idea. “The network loves it,” he assures me, “and they want to go with it. The idea is, there’s this family, see: mother, father, two kids and a dog.” I say, “I think I know that series.” He says, “Now this family goes out in their backyard and they discover a black hole, and they fall into it, and they find a new universe.”

  And I sit there and for a few minutes: I’m too stunned to speak. But then I start giggling at him. And he says, “What are you laughing at?” And I say, “I don’t want this to come as a shock to your nervous system, but a black hole ain’t a black hole.” He says, “What?” I say, “It’s not a black hole. It’s a sun whose matter has collapsed so much that light cannot escape from it, therefore it looks like a hole. It swallows everything its immense gravitational pull can affect and crushes it to nothing. If these peop
le walk out into their backyard and find a black hole it will probably swallow them, their backyard, the house, the street, the neighborhood, the town, the planet and possibly half the known universe, Nielsen ratings, network and all.” He says, “Well, the network likes it. Isn’t there some way we can do it? No one will know the difference.” So I walk.

  That is the level of thinking at which these people work. You know what they need to know. In five seconds any one of you, the worst of you, could come up with a dozen acceptable alternatives to that stupidity I just recounted. You could say: We have multiple universes and they cross each other and someone falls right through. It’s like a tapestry and there’s a hole in it. “Oh, a tapestry, a…like in a cloth…yeah, yeah…that’s terrific, very original…”

  They are so easily conned, it is unfuckingbelievable. You people are smart enough and clever enough, and need not mumble, as I’ve heard so many of you mumble, “Well, gee whiz, gosh golly, Harlan, you can do that sorta thing because you can talk to people. I’m a shmuck, I’m not charismatic.” Okay, you have to get charismatic or resign yourself to playing in the bush leagues for Sol Cohen’s pennies.

  If you want to continue writing for Ted White for the rest of your natural life, terrific! You’ve got the right to stay stupid. You should live and be well. But don’t call me up in the dead of night and want me to save your ass when someone makes you an offer. Which brings me to my final point, and then I’ll answer any other questions you may have.

  For the last few years now I’ve been watching this go down. And I’ve watched this organization do virtually nothing for its members of any commercial value. It does silly things for its members. It spends its time in sophomoric arguments, nitpicking bullshit about membership requirements, dues hikes, whether or not Stanislaw Lem is a creep, whether or not there should be an SFWA tie, SFWA membership cards, a secret SFWA handshake, and it elects to high office idiots who think they’re Napoleon. But that was just amateurish silliness and I did help found this organization, so I stayed on.

  But I no longer feel that I can be part of an organization that clearly has a death wish this strong.

  Therefore, I am resigning from SFWA.

  Don’t call me no more, ’cause I ain’t your “Hollywood liaison” no more. I’m going to pack it in, happily, where SFWA is concerned, and I’m going to do my number out there where no dream is too large or unattainable, and I’m going to get famous and I’m going to get rich, and I’m going to go to England twice a year to see Mike Moorcock, who already knows what I’ve been saying here.† And the rest of you people are going to continue writing for peanuts, and being brutalized, and paying adolescent lip-service to “the sense of wonder” while you continue wearing 1940’s clothes and deluding yourselves that you’re living in Valhalla because you go to a convention and terminal acne cases come and stroke you.

  My resignation will be in the mail, and I will expect a refund on the balance of my dues. This is the last time I will attend an SFWA function. I don’t want the stench of failure on my expensive clothes.

  FEAR NOT YOUR ENEMIES

  This argument for gun control, written shortly after the December, 1980 murder of John Lennon, appeared in the adult fantasy magazine Heavy Metal, which is referenced several times within the piece.

  John Lennon’s on the menu. The worms are having him for dinner.

  It’s a fucking banquet: Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, Luke Easter, Sarai Ribicoff, Stella Walsh, Lyman Bostock, Michael Halberstam, and one hundred and fifty assorted nonentities slaughtered each week, every week, here in our macho democracy. Nonentities, that is, to all but the mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, children, lovers and friends to whom each of those nonentities meant something.

  I’d have included JFK in that list, but we all know that executive ticket-punch was part of a giant conspiracy.

  And I don’t want to bother with pitiful little conspiracies that include only maybe the CIA, the Mafia, the FBI, the Dallas police, Communists and anti-Castro terrorists. That kind of conspiracy is shirred eggs and squashed potatoes. What I like dealing with is the big conspiracy, the one you’re part of.

  Thought we didn’t know you were high up in the order of the big cabal, didn’t you? Thought we didn’t notice, right? Well, we noticed; so don’t go slobbering over the loss of John Lennon, you cowardly punk. Don’t beat your breast as you stand out there in the cold behind the NYPD sawhorses across the street from the Dakota, kiddo. We’re on to you, and as far as I’m concerned you’re as guilty as Mark David Chapman of pumping those four shots into Lennon’s back.

  You didn’t cry for 69-year-old ex-Olympic star Stella Walsh on December 4th when some sonofabitch left her face-down in the parking lot of a discount department store on Cleveland’s near East side, wiping out the 65 track records she set in her extremely worthy lifetime. You didn’t cry when Luke Easter was blown away on March 29, 1979 outside the Cleveland Trust; probably because you didn’t give a shit that that old black man hit twenty-five homeruns in two months in 1949 and played a lot of first base for the Indians. You didn’t cry for twenty-three year old Sarai Ribicoff, senselessly shot to death in the course of a petty holdup outside Chez Helene in LA’s Venice section; most likely because she was Senator Abe Ribicoff’s niece and a Jew and a newspaper reporter and hell, that’s three strikes right there; no pity for the rich, the powerful, the vocal and the members of the International Money Conspiracy. And you’re probably only wailing over Lennon because it’s in the air and gives you a chance to vent some of your fear and frustration. But you belong to the big cabal, chum, and we see through your disingenuous sorrow.

  You started your membership sucking up the BB gun ads in copies of The Incredible Hulk and Batman comics. You paid dues every time you sat in a movie theater and watched the fever-sick violence dreams of Dressed To Kill or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and went down the line proclaiming twisted crap like that “high art” as do some of our more prominently brain-damaged film critics. You rose in the ranks every time you accepted the eloquent vocabulary of a bullet in the gut or a punch in the mouth as the final statement of any argument on Starsky & Hutch or Charlie’s Angels. So now you’re a fully-paid-up, card-carrying psychotic doting on the wonderful full-color panels in Heavy Metal that show some poor slob with his head blown apart like a casaba melon. And you’re as much against gun control as our soon-to-be-installed Chief Executive, Mr. Reagan. And you know what he said, mere hours after Chapman’s Charter Arms .38 special had its say? Well, Ronnie said: “I’ve never believed that gun control laws would help reduce violence. I believe in the kind of legislation we had in California. If somebody commits a crime and carries a gun when doing it, add five to fifteen years to the prison sentence.”

  I’m glad so many of you voted for that kind of asshole thinking. Mr. Reagan’s terrific use-a-gun-go-to-jail law is so effective that Los Angeles has become Murder City: homicides for the first ten months of 1980 were over 800 in the city proper and over 1500 in the county.

  Reagan, you crepuscular old fart, what the hell is wrong with you!?! Who gives a damn how long Chapman lies up in the slam? Lennon is dead, you puddingbrain. Dead. Revenge don’t beat the bulldog. Chapman wasn’t some amoral mugger making his living in the streets ripping off wallets and tv sets. He was a nut. Like all the other nuts who commit a murder every 24 minutes, night and day, every day of the year in this country. When the hell will you read the statistics, Reagan? When will you realize that over fifty per cent of all the gun slayings every year are committed not by the dreaded composite darkie-mestizo-latino alley killer but by friends and relatives, by angry lovers and total strangers when you screwed them out of a parking space or gave them the finger in a moving car. Fifty per cent and more: stupid accidents where a ten-year-old kid sprays his brain matter across the bedroom wall playing with Daddy’s surrogate penis, the bureau drawer Luger; heat of passion arguments in which your girl friend opens up your stomach so your intestines
start unwinding on the carpet like a Duneworld sandworm; deadly misunderstandings like the one that killed baseball star Lyman Bostock, a case of mistaken identity that didn’t mean a damn because Bostock was on the menu.

  How about that, gentle reader, out there crying because Lennon bit the dust, how about that you’re a member of the big conspiracy headed by Uncle Ronnie? You like the tag?

  Don’t give me no shit about how you ain’t in on it, Chuckles. You’re in on it! Because if you weren’t, you’d be doing something about it, instead of sitting there on your ass growing lesions on your brain watching television and putting all that good dope up your snout and reading half-witted sci-fi trash and eating junk food till you’re too lazy to get out of the chair to take a dump. If you weren’t part of the conspiracy to keep the National Rifle Association one of the biggest goddam lobbies in Washington, you’d be sending all your spare cash to Handgun Control, a citizens’ lobby in Washington.

  And don’t hide behind that god-fearing gobbledegook, either. I’ve had it up to here with Rev. Jerry Falwell and Ernest Angely and Billy Graham and all the rest of those TV clowns perverting the tenets of the Judeo-Christian ethos with their non-specific mumble about moral rectitude. They want to censor books and movies and tv and magazines to fit some ancient worn-out idea of purity, but all those fundamentalist millions who’ll deluge a sponsor with vengeful letters because some model exposed her thigh in an advertisement won’t lift a finger or a buck to beat the NRA lobby at its own game. And you know why; because all those Christ-shouters own guns…or if they don’t, they actually believe that the Constitution gives any dip who can sign his or her name to a handgun application the right to own a .357 magnum.