Well, we got it straightened out rather quickly on camera, when Mr. Hamel—who emcees the show—laid that phrase on the audience and I said, “That isn’t what I said, man; why are you making up all that nonsense?” And we were off to the races.
The ladies I faced were Meredith MacRae, Margot Kidder, and Suzanne Somers. Ms. MacRae you may remember from the later years of Petticoat Junction and an episode of The Interns about a week ago. She is married, bright, intelligent, amiable and has just that acceptable touch of show biziness that allows her to subscribe to the “good show” theory without allowing her ethics to be subverted. In short, she won’t go for the show’s okeydoke if she doesn’t believe it.
Ms. Somers is an actress who has spent some years allowing her face and body to merchandise any number of products via paid commercials. This, in itself, is not enough to shove her into prison, though it has left its mark on her. Quite extraordinarily attractive, Ms. Somers has done many tv shows and has appeared in a slew of movies including Daddy’s Gone A-Hunting, Zabriskie Point, The Strawberry Statement, and Take the Money and Run. But she will be best remembered as the motorcycle groupie in Little Fauss and Big Halsy, which oddly enough I’d seen the night before I went to Vancouver. In the film, virtually all one could remember of Ms. Somers was the magnificence of her bust, displayed to enormous (I think that’s the proper term) advantage. Which is rather sad, because on reflection I realized she had brought a touching sensitivity to the part. When I met her in Vancouver, I could not remember what part she’d played in the film, for this reason, and Ms. Somers was a trifle cool in response to my bumbling but genuine attempts to place her in context. When I finally got past the memory of sexuality the screen image had proffered, and recognized her, she seemed to be willing to accept me into her world. I was enormously grateful for that, of course.
The third lady, Ms. Margot Kidder, is a Canadian actress of rare personal qualities. Twenty-two years old, driven to prepare herself as an actress since she was very young, Ms. Kidder had whizzed through a dozen schools all over Canada and has come out the other side as an exemplary human being. (You may remember her as the prostitute in Gaily, Gaily.) Her head is on very straight indeed; she seems content at passionately indulging a deep love affair with common sense and good taste; and her responses on the show were informed, committed, utterly rational, if just the slightest bit unnerving for their honesty. Her alternative suggestion to my Lysistrata theory was that committed women of beauty seduce David Eisenhower and his ilk, and once having hooked him, cut them off till they had promised to end the war.
(Ms. MacRae agreed that was a good idea, and I said I thought it was dynamite except that, if all the really beautiful and sharp women were busy screwing hawks and schleps, guys like me, already on the side of the angels, wouldn’t get any. Ms. MacRae smiled and said, “We’d fuck you because we liked you.” So I subscribed on the spot.)
The show went swimmingly, and the half hour was filmed without event. I think it was a provocative and funny show, but once more I’m brought back to my ambivalence, mentioned earlier.
Here is a show that is genuinely fascinating, yet it is based on what seems to me an essentially unhealthy premise. I was asked, on camera, what I thought of the show. That was a mistake. I told them.
And they naturally attacked my position: that I thought such shows gratuitously widened the artificial gulf between men and women, a situation already unconscionable in our society.
All of which brings me to some considerations of the morality and ethic that underlie the preponderance of shows devised for television. Man Trap is a successful show, albeit a new one (they’ve only been filming for three months as I write this); it runs on CTV, the largest Canadian network; it is syndicated in fifty-five American markets (and for reasons quite apart from ego I wish to god they’d get it in Los Angeles so you could see what I’m talking about here); it was devised by Al Hamel and Bill Lee and Dick Clark, who seem to be relatively decent human beings. (I say “relatively” because in a species that can produce Aquinas and Lieutenant Calley, everything is relative).
The show employs the services of literate, witty, and obviously intelligent women; it is produced with enormous expertise; and the format is attractively original.
Yet it is grounded in a basically ignoble premise.
Like so many other shows that dominate in popularity our screens these days. Consider:
Hee Haw glorifies rural chauvinism and bumpkinism; Mission: Impossible contends any sort of act may be condoned by “secret groups” in the name of law and order; Hogan’s Heroes says Nazi prison camps are, at core, humorous places to spend a vacation; The FBI, particularly repellent in the light of current outcries for investigation of the department, promulgates a wholly romanticized image of government policing of the society; Bonanza continues to deal with the family unit in a time of that institution’s decay and dissolution in terms of violence and unreality; Mayberry RFD lies to the Middle American by telling him 1901 Kansas City still exists, thereby making what he sees around him every day more confusing and terrifying; The Mod Squad says narks and snitching are essentially noble people and activities; The Beverly Hillbillies glorifies bad taste, stupidity, the merits of being nouveau riche, and adds that just plain folks have it all over them eggheads; The Smith Family takes the position that being a cop does nothing but make gentle the man involved daily with brutality and crime…
It is possible to go on and on, but the point seems made. And of course there are glowing exceptions: The Senator, All in the Family (about which a column to come), The Great American Dream Machine, Sixty Minutes, First Tuesday, The Name of the Game in recent months, The Andy Williams Show and a few others.
But these are observations one seldom makes when merely plonked down before the juju box. Caught up in the colorful images, the spark of noise and action, the utter banality of most series…one fails to grasp these underlying concepts that twist and wrench us away from an understanding of the world around us, that pervert our judgments and deaden our sensitivities.
Man Trap is another. It manages through the skill and expertise of Bill Lee and his staff, and the ladies of the panel, to surmount on occasion the smarmy bottom line of its raison d’être.
And one is compelled—even while enjoying oneself as thoroughly as I did on the show—to ask oneself why it is necessary to have a “good show” as Joe Pyne always did, at the expense of truth, forthrightness, honest evaluation, and sensitive discussion. Are we such a debased nation that we must have our bread and circuses and cannot sit still for honest human beings sensibly sifting through the problems of our times for answers?
To say these shows are merely “entertainment” is no answer at all. Nothing is merely entertainment, for if we accept as rationale for muddied ethics and morality that we are putting on a “good show” for the monkeys out there, then we must, by extension, subscribe to the idea that the thirty-eight people who watched Catherine Genovese get knifed to death in a New York street were fulfilling their roles merely by being “entertained.”
And I shudder to think we have sunk to that level of spectator sportism.
101: 11 MAY 72
Lies I could tell, in profusion, pursuant to the demise (after two and a half years’ weekly appearance in the Los Angeles Free Press) and rebirth of this column here, in Rolling Stone, with installment #101 would you believe. How I discovered from the lips of a dying Portuguese fisherman that Amelia Earhart is living in ménage à trois sin with Judge Crater and Algernon Blackwood in the Mato Grosso, and how I went chasing the exclusive. How I was beaten senseless by a pair of six-foot-and-taller professionals in Benedict Canyon and had to take a polygraph test at the West LA police station just to get the city attorney to file, and I’m well enough now, thank you. How I went down to Shreveport to deliver a college lecture and this incredibly carnal eighteen-year-old lady sorta kinda stuck to my coattail and I’ve been, er, uh, busy for a while. How I lead guided tours through the heart
of Mount Vesuvius to earn enough bread to support my paperback book habit, rather than letting them slice off my balls with a cheese grater writing for television. But the simple truth is that I got tired of writing “The Glass Teat” for the Freep and spent the last six or eight months with the tube turned off, not to mention my brain. Yet Rolling Stone editors apparently know no fear, and Ms. Judy Sims (she of the maddening body and the nonexistent expense account) breached my defenses with lures of kinkiness and money, and here we all are again.
For an initial outing, try this:
Back in November my agent called and said, “ABC has given the go-ahead to Stan Shpetner on an ESP series he’s producing at Universal. Cattle call at three o’clock today, screening room two.” What it is, friends, a cattle call, is when they have maybe thirteen assignments for scriptwriting open on a series, and they invite 109 writers to come in and fight for them. It’s illegal, according to the terms of the Writers Guild of America minimum basic agreement, but here we are in Year Five of the LBJ-Milhous Equal Opportunity Poverty Program, and even the Writers Guild averts its eyes.
So, in company with other stellar tv scenarists like John Bloch, George Kirgo, Larry Brody, and Bill Kozlenko, I hied me hence to Universal’s red velvet ghetto viewing room, where I saw a film for tv shown on ABC last season, Sweet, Sweet Rachel, not the finest length of footage I’ve ever encountered, but at least an attempt to get ESP and psychic phenomena on the air.
After the screening, we hiked over to the Black Monolith in the Valley, the Universal Tower, to see the producer, Stan Shpetner. (Aside: in 2001, Kubrick brought these apes to the monolith, see, and when they put their hands on it, why it upped their intelligence. I wonder if one brought a group of tv producers to the Universal monolith, and put their hands on it, if it would lower their intelligence. Just a thought.)
Mr. Shpetner proceeded to inform us that the proposed series, based on the film we’d seen, was to be called The Sixth Sense, and he introduced us to Tony Lawrence, who had created the series format. Mr. Lawrence, who had been working with Mr. Shpetner for some time, looked like a man who has been repeatedly stunned with ballpeen hammers. In the charade that followed, Mr. Lawrence turned out to be a charming and talented human being, the only one of that insidious network-toadying crowd (save for associate producer Bob O’Neill) entitled to wear a white ten-gallon.
The “briefing” by Shpetner was so inarticulate, and so demeaning, that half the writers walked out on it. There are some things even tv writers won’t sit through for money. One of Mr. Shpetner’s hooks to understanding the series (as he saw it) was that this was to be “Perry Mason with telepathy.” The flesh did crawl.
I left the meeting utterly infuriated. Here was the first time anyone’d gotten even this close to doing ESP and allied subjects on television, and the honcho in charge didn’t even understand what he was about! I went upstairs in the Tower to see a friend, and stomped around her office flailing my arms and trying to kick out the big smoke-glass window. (Aside: there is a legend around the Tower that Lew Wasserman, upon seeing The Windows, feared disconsolate writers forced to work on McHale’s Navy or suchlike might try to hurl themselves to peaceful oblivion. So they called in Bruce Lee, the master of the Oriental martial arts—he played Kato on the Green Hornet series among other credits, and is known to the informed as the single deadliest man in the civilized world—and he took a run, and gave it a savate kick that shook the room, but the window didn’t break, it just trembled like Jello-O. I mention this only to let you know that the impression of breathing open space one gets in a Universal office is mythical. In actuality, the offices are made up of removable walls that slide in and out on tracks, and it has come to pass that executives whose series haven’t been renewed, have returned from lunch at the Universal commissary to find not merely the name changed on the door, but the door, the walls, and everything inside gone. It is 1984 come early. You can be erased at Universal, and every smallest evidence of your having been there, within moments. Also, the switchboard girls suddenly start saying, “There is no Mr. Whoever working on the lot at present.”)
Finally, anyhow, I called Shpetner’s office and said, “Listen, I have to talk to you. Now.” He replied, “I’m having a meeting, I haven’t time now.” “Listen,” I bellowed, “either you listen to sixty seconds of what I’ve got to say about what you don’t know about your own goddam series, or I come down there and tell it doing an adagio on your desk.”
So he listened. And when I got done, he said, “Hmmm. That’s interesting. Why don’t you come down and tell it to me again with these fellahs I’m talking to.” So I went down, and there was Shpetner with his feet up on the desk, and he told these people, “Harlan had some very enlightening things to say about the series. Tell ’em what you said, Harlan, since they tie right in with what I was thinking.”
And that was how I came to join the ranks of the Enemy for the first time in eleven years as a tv writer. I was hired on at a staggering sum of money weekly, to be “story editor” of that Saturday-night abomination in the eyes of God and/or Man, The Sixth Sense.
I spent seven weeks in a death cell at Universal, and if you are all good little boys and girls, and if the maggots don’t get into the marmalade so the dog gets the flashes when he sneaks into the jar, Uncle Wiggily will tell you all about how horrendous a steady job in tv can be before one flees shrieking in terror from $1250 a week.
And more! In weeks to come, this column will bring you such tender morsels of criticism and comment as the inside story on how Preview House rips off the networks, the audience, the pollsters, and everyone else in sight
…an interview with lunatic Phil Mishkin, who writes All in the Family, and smokes dope so he can live in a world where the scuttlefish out in the Great American Heartland think Archie Bunker is a hero…my annual two-part review of the new season’s mélange of brain-damaged offerings…idle chatter about what you’re viewing really means and how it pollutes your precious bodily fluids…and just a lot of other good stuff. Be the first in your neighborhood.
All I can guarantee about “The Glass Teat” is what I guaranteed when
it was a Freep feature: there will be no editorial censorship, my ethic and honesty will never be allowed to interfere with my getting a script assignment, some bitter pills will be offered along with a gallows chuckle or two. And I’m receptive to your desires about subject matter. More than that you don’t deserve.
When you get pissed off, by all means write. When you’re delighted, let the editor know.
Nice to see you again.
102: 25 MAY 72
Better the devil we know than the devil we don’t know. That’s what the Delphic doom-criers of the television Mad Caucus Race are saying. Around and around they scamper, the Dodos, Eaglets, Lories, and Mouses of ABC, CBS, and NBC—drenched by the downpour of Department of Justice antitrust suits threatening to shrink their corporate profits with the compassion of a Jívaro headhunter. It’s all the talk this week in the Industry, and it’s the springboard for us this installment, allowing us to bound into a review of network practices passim the financing, shooting, selecting, and programming of pilots, not to mention a review of the funniest half hour to flit across the little-screen in many a year, and why it’ll never get on the air as a series. Oh, yes, gentle readers: death and destruction this week, as the specter of government intervention and retribution terrifies the grand old men on the network mountaintops.
The way the plot goes is like so:
On April 13 the antitrust division of the Department of Justice announced it would file suits against the three major networks and Viacom International, Inc. (a spin-off entertainment-supplying conduit of CBS), under sections 1 and 2 of the Sherman Antitrust Act alleging “that the companies have monopolized and restrained trade in primetime television entertainment programs.” In effect, if successful, what a decision in the U.S. District Court in Los Angeles favoring the Justice Department would do would be to wrest con
trol of network schedules from ABC, NBC, and CBS, and to take out of their muddy little paws decisions on what programs are put on the air, as well as when they go on the air. It would turn back control of these elements to advertising agencies and motion-picture producers, and would prevent the networks from producing any television entertainment or feature films. The suits exclude news programs and—as I read it, though I could be wrong—documentaries.
Now understand this: twenty years ago, advertising agencies pretty much controlled what shows were bought and aired. To a not inconsiderable degree, they still do. (General Mills, Post, Kellogg’s, and Ralston-Purina to this day dominate what kind of programming is done for kids. Bonanza, sponsored in the main by Chevrolet, has never mentioned President Lincoln, though the series is set during the time of his Administration. A story outline proposed by writer Bob White for the Cannon series, dealing with the manner in which millions of dollars of legally overproduced amphetamines are skimmed off government-certified companies and find their way into the street dealerships, was killed on the grounds that “drug companies are heavy advertisers.”)
So I’m not terribly overjoyed at the prospect of the Madison/Lexington Avenue gunslingers sliding back into the catbird seat, with all the attendant horrors of that kind of venality. (Stories are legend in the industry of shows being killed because the wife or paramour or grandma of some ad exec said she didn’t like the pilot. I once had a script over which everyone at Universal was vastly enthused killed on the spot by an account executive because it dealt with a guy who lived with his mother in a Southern town, and this poor sot came from Decatur, Georgia, and still lived with his maman, and he was going through shit changes about it.)
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