Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison; Leonard Maltin

  Here is a sixteen—seventeen million dollar film that functions as a perfect soporific. It isn't even bad enough to be a howler, bad enough to spark vituperation, bad enough to become a cult favorite for those who dote on turkeys. It is just lugubrious. Somnolent. Derivative. Empty. Yes, that's just what it is: empty calories. Not even interesting junk food. No spice, no jump, not even stupid enough to provide uncooked meat for the disputatious critic to amuse his basest instincts. It is, in the vernacular of my people, a lox. It doth but lie there and rot from the head down.

  With the arrogance of the arriviste, above the credits we are told this is A GRAHAM BAKER FILM. Now, if that fails to bring you to your feet with an admixture of awe and gladness, it is because you probably never heard of Graham Baker. His previous credits are the classic draughts from the Waters of Lethe titled The Final Conflict and Impulse. If we are to judge Mr. Baker's potential from this trio of bow-wows, I suggest that the degree of directorial scintillance contained in the batch prepares Mr. Baker for a world-class dive into oblivion.

  Or a return to directing television commercials in England.

  As for the acting, both Terence Stamp and Mandy Patinkin are wasted, performing like shamble-ons excised from a rough cut of Night of the Living Dead; James Caan looks old, tired, puffy and lackadaisical, employing the same thespic shrugs and tics we've seen him substitute for character insight before and since his outstanding performances in The Gambler (1974) and Thief (1981); and everyone else appears to be as one with Jay McInerney's "brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers" waiting for the Bolivian Marching Powder of cocaine to galvanize them into frenetic action.

  Not only is the film slow as the erosion of mountains, but it is slovenly in its basic logic and in its tiniest details: the latter exemplified by Caan returning to his home, trying to find something to eat, eyeing the detritus of a dozen fast food banquets littering the kitchen, living room, bedroom, a vast terrain of garbage . . . and not one cockroach in sight. Trust me on this one, folks. I live in Los Angeles, and while we aren't the cockroach paradise of, say, New Orleans or New York City, it is impossible to leave that much crap lying about in the heat without sounding an orthopterous klaxon that would draw Blattidae from as far away as Pomona. But pristine is Caan's pad, nary an ant—black, red or white—as far as the camera eye can see.

  The former is exemplified by the simplistic treatment of three hundred thousand aliens from outer space being plopped into the middle of Los Angeles. There is virtually no social or physical alteration in the makeup of the city as we know it today. Everyone dresses the same, talks the same, acts the same, and for a budget of 16–17 million, the minutiae of a major new immigrant population is nil. The only one that sticks in my memory is the repellent concept of fast food burger joints serving "raw beaver" (with the fur still on it) alongside the fishwich and fries.

  Consider, if you will, the changes in Miami with the arrival of far fewer Cuban refugees. The changes in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange County with the arrival of Laotians, Cambodians, Koreans and Vietnamese. The changes in New York that altered even that endlessly mutable melting pot at each new wave of Irish, Middle Europeans, Jews, Puerto Ricans. If you have no sense of history to point out the ludicrousness of what Alien Nation substitutes for solid sociological ideation, just compare what I've described here with the society portrayed in Blade Runner.

  And the worst part of this imbecile determination to discount even the least venturous attempt at extrapolation, is that for 94 minutes we have nothing original to look at.

  Coupled with that boring, overexposed, overfamiliar Los Angeles setting we've wearily endured through ten thousand flicks, is a sound mix of intrusive rock so excruciating that we cannot decipher the dialogue, which may be, on further consideration, a blessing in disguise. Ah, yes, disguise.

  Which brings us to disguise.

  This is nothing more than the same old buddy-movie formula with dopey latex masks. Mask disguises for a good ole boys liaison.

  And here is where I draw back my Lou Groza toe to dropkick Rock O'Bannon's ass.

  The great scenarist Ring Lardner, Jr.—The Cross of Lorraine; M*A*S*H; Woman of the Year; and Tomorrow, The World just to name a few—once opined: "No good film was ever made from a poor script." So, though I have made it clear that affection and respect inform my opinions of Rockne S. O'Bannon, even as I accept about one-third of the blame for that long-ago awfulness I wrote when a newcomer to the screenplay, Rock must accept the initial blame for Alien Nation. It's a commercially cynical idea. Rock sat there one day (I was a fly on the wall . . . this is how it happened . . . trust me) and suddenly he said aloud, "Hey, what a great obvious idea for a thriller! A cop-buddy movie with a human being and an alien! Hell, we can cast Patrick Swayze as the human and put John Candy in a funny suit for the alien! Hot shit, this'll make me a fortune!"

  And he took it to market; and because he is dealing with the sort of people I noted a few columns ago, the sort who wanted to make a tv special: "Let's do The Wiz . . . white!" he had no trouble selling the project. Before Gale Anne Hurd picked up on it at 20th in April of 1987, Warners and Paramount wanted it. It was a "hot" idea. Like Pete Hyams standing in front of Alan Ladd, Jr. and getting a deal to make Outland when he suggested, "Let's do High Noon in outer space." Rock O'Bannon is a cagey guy, a canny assayer of the lowered expectations, petty pretensions, and cultural illiteracy of the New Executives who run this industry. Rock is (with one important difference) the very model of the kind of writer who is hitting it big in Hollywood these days. He has his eye not on the sparrow, but on the box office. He spots, early on, the trend for the season; and he boils it down to basics; and he pushes a simplistic version of that trendy idea couched in derivative terms that make the New Execs comfortable. He understands, as do his brethren who write films like The Hidden and Robocop and the Nightmare on Elm Street features, that he is dealing with men and women who are not only ignorant, but who are arrogant about their lack of knowledge. He understands that for such people, the daring offbeat original ideas are anathema. He knows on a primal level the truth of Ellison's First Law of Movie Marketing:

  PHILISTINISM MAKES LUCID COPY FOR DOLTS.

  The important difference between Rock O'Bannon and the larger measure of his brethren, is that Rock has it in him to reach an artistic level most writers can only shade their eyes and aspire to from far below. Up there in the sun, where the air is crisp and the mind seeks to unravel the secrets of the human condition and the universe, few of us are given to exist. For the Steven de Souzas of the world, the Chris Columbuses, even the Steve Cannells, it is a summit unreachable and forever intimidating. They do the best they can, but it is the difference between Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma. King Kong and Mighty Joe Young. Jefferson and Dukakis/Bush.

  The kick in the ass is necessary, because Rock O'Bannon is better. He wrote "Wordplay." He can go there again. For him to get his foot in the feature film door with Alien Nation was cynical and self-destructive. Like the film, it was a calculated act of empty calories, artistic vacuum. For the soul, no surge of enrichment; there were only money and "clout" to be garnered.

  For those who now ask, "Well, what's wrong with that?" I suggest you find another film columnist to read: surely we are dealing with concepts of self-respect and responsibility forever beyond your ken. For those of you who remain, let me digress only slightly to explain why this film was doomed from the starting blocks . . . and please bear in mind that quotation from Ring Lardner, Jr.: "No good film was ever made from a poor script."

  Only god and Bill Warren know where the idea of the buddy-movie began. It has to be somewhen subsequent to the Edison Kinetoscope filmstrip The Kiss (1896), but prior to the most recent Pee-wee Herman extravaganza. After Cain and Abel, but prior to Sly and Brigitte. After the creation of the Heaven and the Earth, but prior to Burke and Hare. If you get my drift: this is an old formula we're looking at.

  Even before the spate of flying buddies movies—ex
emplified by Cagney and Pat O'Brien in 1935's Devil Dogs of the Air—the genre was in full swing, but the chum flick as a separate form was most obvious in the aeronautic alliances. Perhaps the lineal descent is from the first attempt to put Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson on film (about which more in a moment), though the Quirt and Flagg buddydom of the 1926 What Price Glory? certainly sticks out as a watershed event.

  For those who contend the buddy-movie reached its highest point of originality and vigor with the 1939 Gunga Din, in which Cary Grant, Victor McLaglen and Doug Fairbanks, Jr. stood off Eduardo Ciannelli and his ravening hordes howling "Kill for the low of Kali," I'd like to point out that Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, who cobbled up that cockeyed adventure plot, were only rewriting their 1931 hit The Front Page, as perfect an example of the buddy-movie as has ever been remade more times than we can count.

  But by the forties it was a staple commodity, requiring not much more thought for inclusion on a production schedule than an offhand "Who'll we buddy-up with whom?" Or is that who?

  A staple commodity, having manifested itself in dozens of Republic and Monogram westerns of the "Three Mesquiteers" type (and does anyone else remember that ventriloquist Max Terhune and Crash Corrigan were but two-thirds of that rootin' tootin' shootin' trio completed by John Wayne?), reprised to the point of fugue state boredom in all the Dennis Morgan—Jack Carson "Two Guys From—" comedies, the Crosby—Hope roaders, and even proffered in the Batman&Robin mode with Wild Bill Elliott as Red Ryder, Bobby Blake as Little Beaver.

  Through all such flotsam and jetsam (another terrific buddy pairing), the huffingpuffing exhausted idiom dragged itself into the modern era with Duncan Renaldo as The Cisco Kid and Leo Carillo as Pancho.

  ("Oh Seesko!" "Oh Pancho!" "Ha ha ha ha ha!" Which is the way all Saturday morning cartoons and most tv sitcoms from Lucy to Cosby end.)

  This discounts all the Mr. and Mrs. North or Nick and Nora Charles Thin Man flicks, which really don't fit the mold, and I discount them openly just to remind you that I'm being nothing but fair in my selections as the form burgeoned in feature films when The Defiant Ones (1958) proved that if you made the buddy-buddy connection a bizarre one, you might triumph at the box office using a template already hoary and creaky, because critics would tend to overlook the paucity of invention at a plot level, and focus on the acting of the principals, their "relationship": just manacle a tough-but-heart-of-gold black convict (Sidney Poitier) to a bigoted white convict (Tony Curtis), let them escape from the chain gang, and send them on the run. This was the great icon of the buddies-with-animus-toward-each-other subgenre, most recently reprised with Secret Service bodyguard Charles Bronson "manacled and on the run" to his real-life wife, Jill Ireland, as the First Lady in Assassination . . . and bounty hunter Robert De Niro "manacled and on the run" with bail-jumping Federal witness Charles Grodin in Midnight Run.

  Seriatim, the gang-buddy idea overinflated two years later with the success of The Magnificent Seven (from Kurosawa's Seven Samurai), followed by The Professionals in 1966, The Dirty Dozen in 1967, The Devil's Brigade in 1968, and Peckinpah's 1969 gang-buddy classic, The Wild Bunch, ending the decade that year with the buddy-movie that sent the entire film industry scrambling to flood the screen with chums, pals, mates . . . Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And the sluicegates were opened.

  By 1971 you could spot the variations sans recourse to dowsing rod: They Might Be Giants, like the aforementioned Assassination a male-female buddy-up, recasting George C. Scott as Holmes with Joanne Woodward as Dr. Watson. (This is such an obvious duo for the perpetuation of the genre, that hardly a year goes by without a new note being sounded as coda to Conan Doyle's original duet, echoic currently with Michael Caine as a dunderhead Sherlock and Ben Kingsley as a brains-of-the-act Watson in Without a Clue, which I recommend unreservedly.) Other boy-girl buddy-ups: The Late Show (1977) with Art Carney and Lily Tomlin, Foul Play (1978) with Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn, Hanky Panky (1982), Runaway with Tom Selleck and Cynthia Rhodes and Romancing the Stone (both 1984), and Stone's sequel, Jewel of the Nile and Into the Night with Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer (both 1985). And that's just iceberg-tip of boy-girl buddy-movies.

  To demonstrate how interchangeable these phony-friendship-flicks are, Hanky Panky was originally intended as a followup to the successful buddy-movies of Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor—Silver Streak (1976) and Stir Crazy (1980)—but for reasons I'm too weary to recount, Pryor's role in Hanky Panky was revised for Gilda Radner, and no one noticed any dichotomy.

  But wait, there's more!

  Scarecrow with Hackman and Pacino; City Heat with Eastwood and Reynolds; Partners with John Hurt and Ryan O'Neal; The Sting with Redford and Newman; Wise Guys with Piscopo and De Vito; Ishtar with Beatty and Hoffman; Planes, Trains and Automobiles with John Candy and Steve Martin; Lethal Weapon with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover; and Running Scared with Billy Crystal and Gregory Hines (as we return to black and white pairings à la The Defiant Ones); Buddy Buddy, the Billy Wilder—I. A. L. Diamond remake of the French A Pain in the A—, recast with Lemmon and Matthau; Red Heat with Schwarzenegger and Jim Belushi; another girl-boy linking that substitutes Debra Winger for Paul Newman in Legal Eagles with Redford; The In-Laws with Falk and Alan Arkin; Mikey and Nicky with Falk and Cassavetes; ¡Three Amigos! with Chevy Chase, Martin Short and Steve Martin; 48 Hrs. with Nolte and Eddie Murphy; Tough Guys with Lancaster and Douglas; Dragnet with Aykroyd and Tom Hanks; Stakeout with Dreyfuss and Emilio Estevez; Real Men with Belushi and John Ritter; Number One with a Bullet with Billy Dee Williams and Robert Carradine; and Nighthawks with Billy Dee Williams and Stallone.

  Not to mention all the girl-girl buddy-ups—"biddy-movies"?—like Outrageous Fortune with Bette Midler and Shelley Long or Big Business with a pair of Bette Midlers and a pair of Lily Tomlins, which makes it the first buddy-buddy-buddy-buddy movie . . .

  Or such offbeat pairings as those found in films like, uh, er, A Boy and His Dog with Vic and Blood played by Don Johnson and Tiger . . .

  Or even precursors of the human-alien tieup in Alien Nation (which makes it an even less original conception) such as The Hidden with Michael Nouri and Kyle MacLachlan, or Enemy Mine with Dennis Quaid and Lou Gossett, Jr. And all of them foreshadowed in print by Isaac Asimov with his human-robot pairing of R. Daneel Olivaw and Lije Baley in Caves OF STEEL, et al.

  Which list, rendered here as exhausting (though hardly exhaustive) evidence that the buddy-buddy idea was worn to the nub long before Rock O'Bannon came to it, should indicate just how hackneyed and cynical is the core of Alien Nation.

  We would expect no better from a producer like Gale Anne Hurd, whose contract with 20th Century Fox was not picked up this summer in large part because of the disposability of Alien Nation; but we are required to expect more from Rockne O'Bannon.

  Now here's the good news.

  O'Bannon won't be killed by this film. Unlike my situation, which parallels Rock's, it will do him no harm. Alien Nation is so empty of calories, so forgettable, that it will not cast a pall over his name. With the sharp eyes and Me Decade smarts of his scriptwriting brethren, Rock understood that to get what he wanted in this business, he had to toss out a commercial film like this one. It got made. And that is the lowest factor of survival in film work. It got made, and because it got made at a major studio, with major stars, and had a big budget, he has sold another. And next year he gets to direct it.

  Perhaps the means justify the end in a business where Art is anathema. Perhaps.

  But the free ride is ended. Rock O'Bannon is a rare and original writer when he struggles against the rigors of the marketplace. He wrote "Wordplay." And if we choose to give him a pass on Alien Nation, if we choose to let that one go through our memory like shit through a tin trumpet, let him understand this: the free ride is over.

  The next time—and we're all going to be watching—he had damned well better do battle with the gods. And even if he doesn't win, we'd damned well better see some sw
eat.

  This has been a public service announcement.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / March 1989

  INSTALLMENT 34:

  In Which We Praise Those Whose Pants're On Fire, Noses Long As A Telephone Wire

  Right around World Series time last fall, readers of these columns in California, Oregon, Nevada and Washington, also Hawaii, suffered mild cognitive dissonance when they turned on their television sets and saw Your Obedient Servant as oncamera spokesman in a series of Chevrolet commercials, extolling the virtues of a line of Japanese-designed, American-built cars called the Geo Imports. In these sixty- and thirty-second mini-encounters, as I walk through an elegant museum setting, the super that flashes across my body says Harlan Ellison, and under the name appear the words Noted Futurist.

  This designation—however marginally appropriate—however startling to, say, Isaac Asimov or Alvin Toffler or Roberto Vacca, who are commonly held to be both futurists and noted as such—was the appellation of choice of Chevrolet, its West Coast advertising agency, and the director, Mr. Terry Galanoy.

  Friends, acquaintances and casual thugs (who suggest I was selected for these commercials not on the basis of charisma or ability, but because I make the cars look larger), have expressed some startlement at my having been labeled Noted Futurist. "What the hell does that mean?" they codify their confusion, further asking, "Why did they call you that?"