The Harlan Ellison Hornbook

by Harlan Ellison

  And now she’s gone, and there’s nothing much to say about the death of an old woman, any old woman, except that she’s dead and everyone who knew her now has a finite number of days and nights to lament never having said all the things that should have been said.

  She was my Mother, and I miss her.

  By the time I stepped off the platform and returned to the family room at the side of the main chamber, Beverly had been returned to her seat. I’m not sure she even heard the eulogy beyond the telling of the “joke.” After the ceremony was completed—so briefly, so awfully briefly—no one would speak to me. No one came up and said, “That was beautiful, what you said about your Mother.” My nephew Loren shook my hand and we hugged, because he was crying, too, and he said, very softly, “You did good.” Much later, Jerold took me aside and said, “Serita would have been proud of you.” But other than those two remarks, I was shunned. Beverly, the uncles and aunts, they didn’t stone me, but they made sure they didn’t even brush my shoulder. One holds oneself aloof from pariahs and other uncleans. And their outrage frees me of them forever.

  My Mother is gone, and I did what I wanted to do for her: she always enjoyed listening to me read, so I did it one last time for her. I know damned well she never heard it, but it’s an innocent conceit. And they wanted to put her down too quickly, with too few words being spoken. I would have read my eulogy and then asked Beverly and Lisa and Lew and anyone else who had something to say, to come up and say it. She deserved that much at least.

  Eulogies are never for the dead. They are always for the living; to pay off debts; to say goodbye formally one last time. But no one should be sent down into darkness with too few words.

  INSTALLMENT 45

  Interim Memo

  This is the only significant piece of film criticism that I’ve written that wasn’t included in HARLAN ELLISON’S WATCHING. It was omitted on purpose, for inclusion here. That rather irked Gil Lamont, who served as shadow-editor, amanuensis, skilled factotum, indexer and all-around general nuhdz on that hefty volume. Irked him—and in that irkability revealed his secret trepidation—because deep down I believe he—like Jack Chalker and the thousands of demented dipsticks who chivvied him over the years—always thought this book would not be carried to term.

  Now understand something:

  Jack Chalker, for twenty years, did not belabor me with calumny about my dilatory behavior. He was, he says, sanguine in the knowledge that when it was Hornbook Time, I would produce the Hornbook for him. But like the many contributors to THE LAST DANGEROUS VISIONS, as months grew into years and they waited for their stories to appear, a dolorous fatality about the project had to grow in Jack. Yet he maintained. He waited, becoming a prolific and bestselling author just to pass the time; and in large measure specifically because of Jack’s faith and rectitude, I resolved to get this book to him.

  In lesser degree—because he’s only been affiliated with this project for three years—Otto Penzler also kept the lamp burning. I was to have gotten the manuscript to him within ninety days (as I recall) of his sending me an advance payment check for the trade hardcover edition…and it’s been three years. But apart from the usual verbal bamboo shoots under my fingernails that form a necessary part of our peculiar friendship—for Otto and I are as dissimilar an Odd Couple as has come down the pike since Burke & Hare—Otto has been nothing but supportive. (Granted, Otto’s support occasionally resembles the support Long John Silver visited on Jim Hawkins; nonetheless, he is a Prince.)

  And it was this column that assuaged Otto’s irk about a year ago. He saw a note of advance publicity for publication of HARLAN ELLISON’S WATCHING, and called to inquire (ever so quietly, sweetly, politely) as to why I was having this other book published when he was sitting on an unfulfilled contract from two years earlier.

  I explained it all so logically, so thoroughly, and so simply that Otto fell into a paroxysm of apologia, offering me even more money to tide me over till I could get the Hornbook assembled. (Those who know Otto will vouch for this sort of philanthropic, effusive behavior. Largesse, as a common practice.)

  But I could not, in conscience, permit such an extension of friendship. And to return the favor I promised Otto I would not include this Hornbook installment of film criticism in that other book. So it is (as I write this) the only chunk of movie comment to be found outside HARLAN ELLISON’S WATCHING.

  One must keep faith with one’s friends.

  INSTALLMENT 45 | FEBRUARY / MARCH 77

  ENORMOUS DUMB

  Several months of angst, death, and betrayal forming the loci of pain, I was driven from the path of wisdom and philosophy, from contemplations of the richness of the world around me. Surcease! I cried. Respite! Gimme a break. Let me find momentary oblivion. Breathing space. So I embarked on an endless movie crawl.

  Thus, refurbished, comes to you the ellisonian moviegoer, emerging breathing freely again; emerging from the sweet dark cavern of celluloid dreams; blinking in the mid-afternoon effulgence; tummy rumbling from too many Milky Ways (that no longer are made with real chocolate) and popcorn (that is drizzled with something redolently reminiscent of butter, but which ain’t). This here now cute little fellow, bold of wit and perceptive of analysis, snappy dresser and terrific dancer, altogether a credit to his race (not to mention his species, genus and phylum), stands on the sidewalk in front of the theater and asks no one in particular, “Why did they make that movie?” He speaks to the uncaring universe, asking, “Why would anyone want to make that movie?” But in its silence, the universe says Hey, go sit on it, willya, Ellison; I got problems of my own!

  And so, the greater problems of morality and ethic, time and space, art and commerce being handled by everyone from Buckminster Fuller on airport populations to Zsa Zsa Gabor on fiscal responsibility, I address myself to one of the lesser burning topics of our troubled times:

  I would speak of simple-minded movies.

  It does not confuse me in the slightest that someone would make The Shootist as a film. It came from quite a good commercial western genre novel by Glendon Swarthout and, though John Wayne grievously diluted the moral imperatives by rewriting one of the main characters and the ending of the film in the traditional Wayneian bullshit manner that cannot bear to deal with reality if a bit of cliché fantasy is handy, it is a strongly mythic story that gave Wayne his best chance actually to create a character in many years. I can understand the thinking that preceded the scripting of such a film.

  Likewise, it does not stretch credulity that such a group of once-blacklisted talents as Martin Ritt, Zero Mostel and their compatriots chose to cast Woody Allen as The Front and proffered a serio-comic indictment of the McCarthy Fifties. Nor that Altman would find impressive material in the stage production of Kopit’s “Indians” and turn it into Buffalo Bill and the Indians. And Shoot, The Bingo Long Traveling All-Star and Motor Kings and even a simple, direct action adventure like Sky Riders make their raisons d’êtres known within the first twenty minutes of exposure.

  But what kind of dingbat thinking leads apparently rational human beings to think that aloha, bobby and rose or Car Wash or The Ritz or Murder by Death have any value beyond being cut up for use as mandolin picks?

  Not to mention a genuinely evil movie like Lipstick, a mindless mélange like The Gumball Rally, a flat-out moronic cheat like Obsession, an icky piece of terminal tackiness like The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox or a card-carrying stupidity like The Big Bus—all of which are such dogs they ought to be led out of the theaters on leashes.

  These are motion pictures so wrongheaded, so utterly without cerebrating substance, so adolescent and clownish, that they quite literally compel the viewer to scratch his or her head and wonder Why?

  These films I mention with such vehement denigration are only the most recent in memory. There have been endless others over the past two years—and I hasten to clarify by saying I’m not referring only to “bad” films such as The Hindenburg, which simply turned out
to be a turkey.

  Let me thumbnail sketch the plots of a few of these films, in the event you’ve been fortunate enough to escape them. Bearing in mind, of course, that any story, capsulized in one sentence, is going to sound as stupid as MOBY DICK if one were to summarize it as the tale of a one-legged nut chasing a big fish. But the point is, I think, in large part, that excellences such as Taxi Driver or Lifeguard cannot be thematically summarized in one sentence, and these films can. aloha, bobby and rose takes two thoroughly dull young people, cobbles up an illogical sociopathic situation for them, and then sends them on the run for no particular good reason; the young man gets shot to death, again illogically and conveniently, and the film ends with the girl crying over his corpse in the Los Angeles rain. (Yes, indeed, we does have Los Angeles rain.) (And you’d just adore our Los Angeles lava flow.)

  Car Wash has some funny moments and some interesting performances, most notably by the young black comic Franklin Ajaye and by Ivan Dixon, who ought to take off some weight. But. There is virtually no plot. It’s all about a bunch of very flip-talking black dudes working in a car wash, and it’s like a non-singing Cotton Club Revue of the Seventies: sight gags, running shticks, vignettes, and an almost obstinately hyper need to seem “hip” (or hep or hap or hop or whichever is supposed to be the pronunciation of the moment).

  The Ritz is a bore. Based on the Broadway farce of the same name, it concerns itself with the hysterically senseless (and always loud, never under 180 decibel) activities of a straight slob from Cleveland hiding out from his mafioso brother-in-law who wants to kill him, in a gay hotel/baths vaudeville set in New York. Reviewers have lauded this bit of dreariness, somehow forgetting how good The Boys in the Band was, and praising Rita Moreno’s performance. Where were those critics when Ms. Moreno burned the screen with her brilliant performance in The Night of the Following Day?

  The Gumball Rally and Mother, Jugs & Speed are chiefly concerned with the contemporary cinematic replacement for the templates of the shoot’m’up Western: the car crash. Much meat and metal is macerated in the course of what are intended as “funny” films about driving fast, flipping cops the bird, and practicing at being scofflaws.

  Lipstick panders to the basest, vilest, lowest possible common denominators of urban fear and lynch logic. It is the sort of film that, if you see it in a ghetto theater filled with blacks, will scare the bejeezus out of you. The animal fury this film unleashes in an audience is terrifying to behold. It gives exploitation a bad name; and it has less to do with rape, which is the commercial hook on which they’ve hung the salability of this bit of putrescence, than it does with the cynicism of Joseph E. Levine, a man who probably has no trouble sleeping with a troubled conscience.

  Murder by Death is one long, repetitive in-joke for subscribers to the Detective Book Club and members of the Mystery Writers of America. Neil Simon, who wrote the film, is a man whose universal acceptance as a major comedy talent escapes me. Like John Simon, I find this other Simon to be a superficial creative entity, more fitted to tickling the risibilities of Scarsdale women’s club matinee audiences than to grappling—even humorously—with life in our times. It is, purely put, a dumb film.

  As for The Duchess and the Dirtwater Fox, after I saw it in London, I rushed back to my hotel to take a shower. The sight of Goldie Hawn’s stained underwear, and George Segal (one of my personal heroes) demeaning himself with pratfalls and moronic dialogue, made me feel as if I’d stayed overnight in one of those Lyons House fleabags on the Bowery. If this is the state to which the American Western film has fallen, we are in worse shape than even a decade of Nixon/Ford leads us to believe.

  These are films that, in one or two cases, have bright moments in them. A funny gag or two in The Big Bus, some hilarious antics in Car Wash, the Rita Moreno performance in The Ritz. But that’s not the point, good or bad film. The point is: why? For whom are these films slanted, to what end are they made, about what of consequence are they speaking? Nowhere in these films can one find a coherent theme or underlying philosophy. They are like the dancing madness of the Middle Ages: they simply dervish without rationale.

  Yes, of course, we can assume they were made to make money. But what quirky self-delusion convinced backers to put up the money for films without bankable stars or scripts by big-name writers or directed by men or women whose work has drawn for them a loyal following? What auguries did they consult to convince themselves that there would be a ticket-buying market for a spoof of disaster films such as The Big Bus or a pointless exercise in violence like aloha, bobby and rose?

  I take it as a bellwether of the condition of the film industry today. Thousands of dynamiters from other lines of work—parking lot owners, garment manufacturers, computer company magnates, stock analysts—need diversification; they need tax write-offs, they need shelters and capital gains deals. Most movies lose money. That’s terrific for their purposes. And so they become easy prey for the show-biz hangers-on who cling to the hull of Hollywood like barnacles to the underside of a barque. As a film scenarist myself, I have been approached well over a dozen times in just the last eight months to “participate” or “spec write” a treatment or script for juicy little guys with leisure suits and ice-cube eyes who have found an angel and want to get up a project.

  For them, the art is in the dealmaking, not the creation. For them it is always a project, not a piece of art. And they have no sense or understanding of the creative act, and therefore they are as gullible as yokels freshly fallen off the turnip truck. You can sell them any damned stupid idea if you can orally spin a storytelling web around them.

  And the results, if the project goes beyond the talking and seed-money stages, are hideous to behold. They are like thalidomide babies, crippled and illogical and graceless.

  The reason for dumb, mindless, simpleton movies is that the people behind them, usually, are not creators in any sense of the word. They are nouveaus but lately come to the state of grace where they think they understand how a story should be strung together, what an audience wants (and they always throw demographics at you), and the subtle truth of that most imbecile of concepts, the auteur theory…that the director is the author of the film. They are, as Pauline Kael has pointed out, businessmen in charge of an art form.

  They are, at bottom line, men and women who have been not-so-subtly seduced by the philosophy Andy Warhol propounded as a gag, that we have such a lemminglike need for superstars that one day soon everyone will be a star…for fifteen minutes. And these are people who look with disdain on their lives as Dentists, CPAs, Hairdressers and Business Moguls. They wanna play with the stars. They wanna roll in the fields of Elysium. And so they offer their hoard in exchange for being able to have cocktails at the Polo Lounge, and the smooth little salamander people suck them into deals, and sometimes the deals come to fruition and we get…

  Dumb movies.

  It is so grotesque a period for motion pictures, with so much persiflage and imbecility being thrown out onto the screens of America, being four-walled in drive-ins, being hyped and pre-packaged to sucker the unwary, that it makes the despotic days of Louis B. Mayer and Jack Warner seem like The Golden Age.

  INSTALLMENT 46

  Interim Memo

  And so it ended. This last essay, calculatedly a coda to the television essays I’d written circa 1968–1972, collected in THE GLASS TEAT and THE OTHER GLASS TEAT, served as update and more-or-less final statement about the television medium. It appears as the introduction to my 1978 story collection, STRANGE WINE; and it is included here as part of the Hornbook cycle, in the spirit of completism.

  Upon reflection—buttressed by rereading these forty-six pieces a decade and a half later—it becomes clear to me that what I was learning when I wrote the columns of “The Glass Teat” series, was put to effect in the Hornbook outings; and that the year I spent doing these commentaries was a transition phase, a bridge between the casual, peripatetic manner of the tv criticism, and the more structured wri
ting in AN EDGE IN MY VOICE and HARLAN ELLISON’S WATCHING.

  Throughout those years, my fiction and film/tv work was drawing most of the attention, and the non-fiction writing—perhaps because it was appearing in Southern California rather than in a national venue—was almost totally ignored. But when I insisted on including four essays in STALKING THE NIGHTMARE (1982), suddenly an audience developed for the commentaries. Mike Burgess of Borgo Press solicited a collection of essays, and did so solely because of the four pieces in STALKING. It took me by surprise, to be honest. Though I’d been writing easily as much non-fiction as stories since I’d begun my career—and had done even more work as journalist, columnist and magazine article slavey during college and the first years of professionaldom than I had as a fictioneer—I’d always downgraded the importance of the non-fiction in my own mind. Have no idea why that was so. Perhaps because, when I was learning my craft, fiction was more highly considered by the Establishment, magazines published tons of fiction, and those who wrote non-fiction usually did it from some special knowledge.

  But when Burgess asked for the book that became SLEEPLESS NIGHTS IN THE PROCRUSTEAN BED, that new audience appeared; and since that first venture—somehow the two TEAT books seemed out of contention—well, everything I’ve done in the essay form has found its way into print in hardcover. Now, with the publication of the HORNBOOK, the last large chunk of commentary is on the record.

  As for this final word on television, written twelve years ago, the only comment that seems needful by way of updating is this:

  Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

  Or, as we say in the teevee biz, “Whaddaya think, Bruce, can we recycle Perry Mason again? Howzabout we make him blind, quadriplegic, transvestite and miraculously remitted from AIDS? Whaddaya think?”