Other Glass Teat

by Harlan Ellison

  (I feel particularly angry about them this week, to be quite frank; for the contract negotiations with the Producers’ Guild were presented to a membership vote of the WGAw recently, and once again the hacks and moneygrubbers had their way; rather than leaping on the fortuitousness of this being a “tight money” time to get some artistic control of our work, rather than merely to ask for higher minimum rates on scripts, the venal bastards gave the aye to contract demands that make us more bread but keep us once again in the menial position of hired hands without any say-so about what we can write and how we can write it. This constant reminder that many of my fellow-WGAw members conceive of themselves not as creators or artists but as literary bricklayers or septic tank drainers is a saddening thing, compelling me once again to the pay-toilet conclusion.)

  Howsomever, C.V.’s overstatement that most tv scripts lack research is simply ignorant of the most obvious facts. Such as: how much research need one do to write a Bewitched segment or Bonanza or The Lucy Show or Green Acres or Mayberry RFD? And that’s the sort of common-knowledge show that fills up most of the primetime series. So, right off the bat we kill the word most. But further: many shows deal in areas where the form has become so totemized—Westerns and legal-eagle series spring most handily to mind—that the medium has become so much a part of the message it goes unheard. Open on a Dodge City street and without even closing any mental circuits we know approximately the year of the segment, approximately the social and emotional tenor of the people, the level of technology, the limit and range of story plots available to us. The lode has been pretty well mined by this time. So research is ingrained. Only specifics are needed, and not knowing the difference between a sheriff and a marshal ain’t that debilitating a drawback.

  Now let me rush in here with a digression that will become a full examination in a few moments: I’m not defending not knowing the difference between a sheriff and a marshal. What I’m saying is that in this case it isn’t pivotally important. Bear the distinction in mind for a second; I’ll get back to it. Hopefully.

  To tie off the derogatory utterance by C.V. that the “old Harlan Ellison” (a phrase I’ll thank you to forget as May 27 and my thirty-sixth birthday lumber toward me) is selling out for some unstated and nefarious reason, is excusing lack of research in some areas while reviling it in others, understand this: frequently a writer may spend days getting his facts right, only to have them altered for production or simplification values (?) by the producer, the director, or the network. The writer has to bear the rap for it, though. On Cimarron Strip I once saw a segment in which a female character who ran a restaurant served a cowhand “coffee and skittles.” I pointed out to the producer that “skittles” is an ancient Welsh bowling game, not a pastry. But they repeated the error in several later segments because someone had gotten it in his head that a skittle was a croissant or something, and it sounded correct. Any writer in whose show that error appeared would ever after have to bear the stigma of being a dunderhead. And sometimes, while this is not an excuse but merely an explanation, you simply don’t know you’ve made a mistake, and with the best of intentions, without any conscious attempt to fudge reality, a writer can err. It’s only, as they say, human.

  Which brings me to the second letter.

  Larry D. Farrell, a graduate student in bacteriology at UCLA, who holds “both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in that field and expects to complete [his] Ph.D. in about six months” wrote as follows:

  “Recently, I saw the first rerun (and hopefully, it will be the last) of ‘The Satan Bug’ in NBC’s Monday night movie. I counted no less than eighteen technical errors in this pseudo-scientific abortion, ranging from those which would be obvious to the dullest layman to those which would be detected only by someone more knowledgeable. I also vividly remember an episode of the ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ series in which Percy Rodriguez, playing the role of a ‘scientist,’ supposedly identified a virus, which had been developed by our old friend Thrush, by a cursory examination of a ‘culture’ under a light microscope. Bull!!!

  “I realize that the studios, for the most part, are not concerned with realism. Okay. But why can’t those who strive for realism be certain that their actors correctly pronounce scientific words used in scripts (re: ‘Marcus Welby’s’ pronunciation of titer as tĭter rather than tīter). Agreed, these are small points and they affect only a minority of the movie and television audience but they greatly detract from whatever enjoyment one might derive from watching such pseudo-scientific representations. Why don’t television and movie studios contact technical advisors before filming such crap?”

  While Mr. Farrell’s gripes are well founded, in the main they are irrelevant. I’ll try to explain why…that is, if you’re still bearing in mind verisimilitude and what I said about such errors not being pivotally important.

  But before I do, he said, throwing in another digression, let me recount a personal experience about how actors fuck up a writer’s words, that harks back to Mr. Farrell’s complaint about Percy Rodriguez.

  I was fairly fresh in town. I got an assignment on the old Ripcord series, just before it and Ziv Studios went to that Great Trendex Rating in the Sky. I wrote a script about a greater writer, Hemingwayesque by intent, who was dying of cancer and was planning to commit suicide by taking a ’chute drop and not pulling the cord. At one point in the script the writer, Aaron Sparks, is interviewed by a newsman who says to him, “Tell me, Mr. Sparks, how does it feel to be the last of the giants? They’re all dead and gone now…Hemingway, Faulkner, Thurber, Camus…you’re the last. How does it feel?”

  I was whey-faced and innocent. I didn’t know what filmed tv was like. The segment was shot and I managed to get invited to see the “dailies” only by chance. But there I sat in a darkened viewing room at Ziv as they ran that scene. To begin with, they’d changed my newsman to a woman (on the theory, I suppose, that there was no sex in the script), and I sat there as she stumbled through her lines like Joe Namath after the KC Chiefs did an adagio on his face. She gibbered through my lines till she got to the part where she said, “They’re all dead and gone now…Hemingway, Faulkner, Thurber, CAY-MUSS…” and I came straight up out of that screening-room seat like a man with a Roman candle up his ass.

  “No! No no no no, you jerks. It’s KAH-MEW not CAY-MUSS! You’ve got to change that!”

  The executive producer, a gentleman named “Babe” Unger, turned around in his seat and demanded to know who the lunatic in the back of the room was, and why he was there, and why he was shouting. The producer, a very good guy named Jon Epstein, sank down in his chair and said it was the writer. “Not the writer, I bellowed, “I’m T*H*E W*R*I*T*E*R!” (In those days, before lumps, I was surfeited with the belief that the creator of the story was more than a piece of shit to be flushed away after the words FADE-OUT were written. I’ve since learned better, but I still bellow for the cap letters and the little gold stars.)

  “Toss him out,” Unger mumbled.

  Jon Epstein promised they would loop out the offensive word because god knows it might cost them a couple of big nickels to have the actress come in to dub that line, but either he forgot or he couldn’t, because every time they rerun that idiot show, some friend calls me from N’walens or N’Yawk and laughs at my stupidity…don’t you know how to pronounce Camus’s name, Ellison, you morphodite?

  So don’t talk to me about boob actors, Mr. Farrell. I’ve suffered far greater indignities at their mouths than you.

  But again, it plays right back to verisimilitude and the validity of being minuscule-point accurate. What does it matter to the great mass of viewers whether titer or Camus is pronounced correctly, as long as the show makes its point and hits them where they live?

  For you or me, a great deal of difference. For them, none whatsoever.

  Which is why most directors and actors (on whom falls responsibility for accuracy of dialogue and pronunciation) are little better than illiterates on any subject’s minutia
e save that of directing or acting. They can rap for endless boring centuries about motivation and sense of space and relationship and all that other semi-psychiatric bullshit, but they haven’t the faintest idea how to pronounce Goethe or of the difference between an EKG and an EEG. Since no one really gives a shit, no one insists they go to school and learn what it’s all about. Again, I said most directors and actors, not all. Bob Culp and Leonard Nimoy and Lee Pogostin and Jim Poe are typical of the exceptions: brilliant, educated, literate.

  And thus, through C.V., Farrell, digressions, and other sidetrackers, we come to the central thesis of this piece (which, because I’ve gone on at such length, will probably have to be condensed).

  It doesn’t matter what the truth is, as long as it looks real.

  That may seem heresy coming from a dude who keeps bleating constantly about TRUTH THIS and TRUTH THAT, but both C.V. and Farrell pick nits from privileged viewpoints. To a physiologist, the giantism of Land of the Giants is laughable. It ignores the inverse cube law. It can’t be. It never could be. But kids all over this country dig the show, and after a while you are willing to suspend disbelief to groove with the story. That is, you would be willing to do so were not the plots so fucking stupid and boring.

  What I’m saying is that in many areas of human knowledge as they apply to tv scripts, it isn’t necessary to the enjoyment of a certain show that every little nut and bolt be screwed down tightly. Mr. Farrell even contradicts himself in one sentence, the second from the end, when he says that (a) these small points affect only a minority of the audience but (b) greatly detract from their enjoyment. Well, you can’t have it both ways, Mr. Farrell. If you’re hip enough to realize that there may be only .006 percent of the total viewing audience who can spot such an error as a “culture under a light microscope,” then that means 99.994 percent of the audience doesn’t know they’ve been messed over and they don’t care. And if they dug the show, and it made its point and it entertained them, then, for all rational purposes, it doesn’t matter.

  It’s a matter of education, on the big end of the funnel. At one end we have the actors, directors, writers—the creative folk. On the other end we have the Silent Majority. If you get all the creators educated, it still doesn’t mean anything because the Mass doesn’t know.

  Where it matters, and this is the ultimate answer, I think, is in expanding the parameters of general knowledge of the Mass. For the last thirty years no one but a righteous hermit would have written a Western with the posse riding giraffes, because everybody knows they used horses in the American West of the 1800s. The courtroom farces of the twenties and thirties can’t play today because we’ve had eighteen years of Perry Mason and The Defenders and The Law and Mr. Jones, et al. People now know the feel of a court of law (which is why the Chicago Conspiracy guerrilla theater trial is such a shocker). Similarly, even hack writers no longer write sf screenplays in which meteors whistle as they zoom past a spaceship. Everyone knows there is no sound in a vacuum, and they know space is a near vacuum, so there ain’t no way a meteor can whistle. Their knowledge, because of exposure to more facts, has grown.

  It seems to me that up to a certain point (and that point is gross, glaring inaccuracy that invalidates an entire story) the only thing that counts is verisimilitude. It should seem right. It should feel right. It should at least give the appearance of truth and accuracy, because the essential point is that tv is not reality.

  Who really believes there are witches like Samantha? Who really believes people can be as idiotic as those on The Beverly Hillbillies or The Brady Bunch? By the very act of watching such shows, we accept the illogic, impossibility, and irrationality of what they’re doing. We accept the hype in exchange for some few moments of cheap pleasure.

  I quite agree that on serious dramatic shows absolute accuracy should be the goal, but I hardly think we can take too much affront at scientific bungling on U.N.C.L.E. or The Satan Bug. They are fantasies, friends. They can no more be accurate than relevant.

  If you want truth and reality and decimal points in the right places, watch The 21st Century or First Tuesday. Don’t look for truth on The High Chaparral or Face the Nation.

  63: 8 MAY 70

  In an attempt to keep my house from getting ripped off while I’m out of town, I didn’t bother mentioning two weeks ago that, as soon as I returned from my lecture gig, I was going out on the road for eight days, touring with Three Dog Night. But I did, and I’m back, and aside from being an unshakable believer in the grandeur and nobility of that particular rock outfit (and don’t none of you effete underground snobs give me no shit; just go and hear them play this week in San Berdoo and you’ll be where I am, proselytizing-wise), I have come back with material for a lead article in Show magazine that will put you all away. Humbly, I urge you to keep watch, maybe three issues from now, for “Dogging It in the Great American Heartland.”

  All of which brings me to my ramble for the week: the singular place of television in the lives of rock musicians on tour.

  I picked up the group in New Orleans. They’d already done Monroe, Shreveport, and Baton Rouge. I stayed with them through New Orleans, Houston, Austin, Lubbock, Fort Worth, and Dallas. Then I came home and collapsed. Those guys earn every dime they get paid.

  In New Orleans, we were billeted at a two-hundred-year-old hostelry called the Bourbon Orleans. Refurbished, classy, big suites with the bedrooms up a winding staircase above the sitting rooms. And the first room I wandered into was Chuck Negron’s. The tv was going. Chuck wasn’t there. He was out sunning himself beside the pool and his room had been commandeered by a clutch of groupies who work at the Warehouse (New Orleans’ answer to the old Fillmore), who needed a place to hang out till the concert. Negron, one of Three Dog Night’s lead singers, was not there. I mention it again, and I underline it, because you see—the television set was on.

  I heard that. So what? The little girls were probably watching it? Forget it. The chicks were so spaced, all they were watching was the granulated interior of their own skulls. No, Negron had turned the set on, had left it on when he went out, and it was my first encounter with the syndrome known as Acceptance on a Lower Level.

  I got rid of my bags, washed up, and went looking for skinny Danny Hutton. He was in his room, rapping with the roadie (road manager to you), Gary McPike, and the assistant promoter for Concerts West (who’d set up the tour), Joe Gregg. They were talking earnestly about the forthcoming heat problem in the Warehouse, they were listening to the new Van Morrison album…and the tv set was on behind them.

  No one was watching it.

  Mindlessly, The Edge of Night was talking to itself.

  We exchanged hellos, dropped a few zingers into each other’s libidos, and I went off to meet the other members of the group I hadn’t met in Los Angeles.

  Floyd Sneed was selecting a crushed-velvet, tie-dye jacket for the gig. And the tv set was going. He wasn’t watching it.

  Joe Schermie was spraying his room with strawberry sachet to get rid of the scent of incense to get rid of the scent of…anyway, the tv was going and he wasn’t watching it.

  Cory Wells was answering fan mail. His back was turned to the tv set, and it was going, and he wasn’t watching it. Are you beginning to get the idea?

  During the eight days of the tour, living in and out of hotels and those ghastly Holiday Inn coffins, the tv sets in all the rooms (even mine, after a while) were going all the time. Even after the late late news, and the last Brian Donlevy flick, the farm parity reports, and the sermonette, even after the test pattern…the sets still buzzed on mindlessly. Through the night, and all through the day. Usually it was nothing but snow.

  For members of my parents’ generation, that will seem like a blasphemous act. Those of you too young to recall the Depression, when Mom and Dad went around the house turning off lights behind themselves, moving constantly in shadow, saving on the electric bill, will not understand how uptighting it can be for older folks to walk into a r
oom to find a tv set going. Think of the electricity! But for rock musicians on a hideous hegira from here to there, living in Saran-Wrapped rooms, eating hamburger and whipped potato meals that look like dirty Brillo pads with a side order of soggy tennis ball, it is a necessity.

  I’ll try and explain. And thereby make a new comment on the uses to which tv can be put.

  Road touring is a singularly dehumanizing activity. The days seem to be only six hours long. You get up, in a room that looks precisely like the room in which you woke up yesterday, and the day before. You panic for a moment; where am I? What town is this? Then you call the desk and ask. You have only time to shower, shave, and pack to make the limousine for the airport. Then the flight. Into a new city, into another horrendous Holiday Inn. Same room, different city. Time to kill. Two hours, three hours, four hours. But dead hours. So you go shopping. (The average rock musician’s wardrobe expands greatly on tour.) Then a fast meal. Then the concert. Then back to the motel for whatever. We can’t talk about that here. Libel, busts, aggravation. You know. Then, finally, you crash. To awaken the next morning and do it all over again.

  What kind of man can stand this sort of alienating, brutalizing routine? No man ever born of man and woman. He must become little better than an automaton, a zombie, a myth creature whose existence need only be supported for the hour and twenty minutes during which he is onstage. After that, his bodily functions are slowed, his breathing becomes shallower, his eyes glaze, and he manages to slouch through the time till the next appearance onstage.