An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  But the price one commands in this town, whether writer, actor or director, is linked with how much clout one can summon up; and for years now the directors have used the myth of the auteur theory as their most powerful negotiating tool. The theory, for those who have been living in a sensory deprivation tank for the last two decades, is one propagated first by the nouvelle vague French directors, post-1959. Stripped of superfluous rationalizations, the theory says that the director is the author of the film, on the basis of his or her “personal style” brought to bear on the material.

  The material, you must understand, is how the original conception, whether novel or short story or original screenplay, is depersonalized in directorial euphemism. Sometimes the dream of the writer is referred to as the “property.” (A writer of my acquaintance once stood up at a seminar where a producer was blithely talking about “properties” and denounced him as a fatuous martinet, advising him that she wrote screenplays and stories and an occasional novel. She did not write “properties.” “Properties,” she snarled, “are empty lots in the San Fernando Valley or condominiums in Malibu! I don’t write those!”)

  But pollution of the language, employed in the service of those building clout translatable into percentages of gross profits (what we out here call “points” in a deal), is only one of the meretricious expedients used by directors to assume control of a project, to establish the auteur clout, to put his or her personal stamp on the creation of a writer.

  Most of you actually go for that okeydoke.

  Like studio executives and producers in Hollywood, you actually believe the credit line preceding the title of a movie that proclaims it A FILM BY PETER BOGDANOVICH or A FILM BY HAL ASHBY. The Writers Guild has been fighting that form of screen credit for years. They are not films by Bogdanovich or Ashby (to select just a pair of obvious miscreants in this respect); they are films directed by Bogdanovich or Ashby. Bogdanovich did not write Paper Moon, Alvin Sargent did, from a novel by Joe David Brown titled ADDIE PRAY. Hal Ashby didn’t write Harold and Maude, Colin Higgins did.

  But seldom does an audience remember the actual author of a film—and how many of you can remember the name of the writer of a television segment you enjoyed just last night? That serves the end of reducing the writers’ creative and economic clout in Hollywood; and it always has. Writers, for the most part, are chattel in the film / tv industry. They have no more say over what happens to a script they’ve written than a prisoner in Raiford State has over the license plates he stamps out every day.

  While that has traditionally been the invidious nature of the industry, for the last twenty years it has been insufferable for writers who give a damn about what they write. (The hacks, the “creative typists” who fill most of those empty hours of primetime, don’t give a hoot. The going rate for a sixty-minute teleplay these days is $9972.00 with a raise expected after the upcoming Writers Guild contract negotiations later this year. Good or bad, inspired or donkeywork, that’s the rate.)

  Insufferable because of the auteur theory and the considerable clout directors now possess. We’re not discussing here those six directors worldwide who are the best, the six whose individual voices—whether you like their films or not—set them apart from all other directors who are merely craftspersons of greater or lesser ability…from, let us say, Spielberg and Walter Hill and Ridley Scott at the pinnacle to, again let us say just as a rule of thumb, Eliot Silverstein, Otto Preminger and Irwin Allen in the pits…but all directors have that clout by implication. The myth has become the reality.

  Studio heads who are, for the most part (as Pauline Kael has termed them) businessmen running an art, are the most insecure and superstitious lot one could ever meet. They have no idea whom they can trust because they simply do not understand the creative act, and since they cannot read a script—they have assistants read them and prepare one-paragraph synopses—they fear and distrust writers. Treating writers as equals, listening to their ideas of how a film should be made, is about as salutary an idea to a studio executive as taking a ball peen hammer to every mirror in the house.

  But directors are the auteurs, they believe that. And directors can be wonderful salesmen. They come in with all that freighting of auteur myth going for them, and they simply dynamite the producers or execs into believing that they have the vision. That they know just how to revise and reshape and mold and twist and disembowel the script created by a single intellect, to make it a fifty-million grosser.

  We’re not talking about the six real directors in the world; we’re talking about guys so lame they cannot direct themselves to the toilet on the sound stage.

  Like the guy who was directing that script of mine years ago, who complained about how fully written it was.

  So he conned the producers into believing that he was an auteur, this dreary wimp, and he established territorial imperative, and he ignored the shots that might have given the show some vestige of originality, and he restaged most of the shots so they didn’t work, and the segment looked like an outtake from The Terror of Tiny Town.

  But here’s the part that convulsed me.

  The story took place in 1888, in the American West. I had extrapolated, using the obscure history of the period, and come up with the not-implausible concept: that Jack the Ripper, having ceased his rampage of slaughter against the whores of London’s Spitalfields, had fled the country on an immigrant packet ship and, working his way westward in America, had finally come to the Cherokee Strip where the same conditions of poverty and libertine living that had prevailed in Whitechapel manifested themselves. And his psychopathic nature reasserted itself, and he started killing the prostitutes who filled the nautch houses lining the Cimarron City staging area where thousands waited for the opening of the Strip so they could stake land claims.

  So in an early sequence of the script, the Ripper is stalking a woman down the night-shrouded streets of Cimarron City, and I’d written it in ways that would heighten the terror by having it shot strictly in misdirection: in windows, in the eyes of a night owl on a building, in pools of water.

  But the auteur gave all that a pass. He shot the usual cliché sequence with closeups on running feet, using an Arriflex, a hand-held camera.

  But here’s the part that convulsed me.

  Picture it in your skull, if you will: the woman’s feet running down the wooden sidewalks of Cimarron City…fast! A goddamn blur of speeding tootsies. What I’m talkin’ here is mondo speedo, gang! Cut to the feet of a man in tailored black pants, a Gladstone bag dangling from his hand so that it’s in the shot. Slow. Veeeery slow. A stalking, measured pace; the stealthy walk of the mad killer. But slow. Veeeery slow.

  And it speeds up. The woman goes faster, faster, faster, running like a bat out of hell. But the Ripper keeps on stalking her slowly, slowly, veeeeery slowly.

  And he catches her.

  Don’t ask me how. If we could judge by the real world, anyone running as fast as that woman was running would have been not only out of the town, but out of that time-zone before a guy pacing along that slowly could catch her.

  But he caught her. Don’t ask me how.

  So what is all of this about directors in aid of?

  Well, directors are much on my mind these days. Prominently so, since I caught the press screening of The Empire Strikes Back in London on May 19th. I was on a breather in England and France—while the attorneys settled the lawsuit against ABC-TV and Paramount Pictures you’ve read about in Time magazine—and finishing up a new novel; and Craig Miller, who was then with Lucasfilm, set it up for me to see the press screening at the Dominion Theatre in Tottenham Court Road.

  (And just to set at ease all you incipient werewolves out there, poised to spring at my jugular, though I still maintain that Star Wars had all the smarts of a matzoh ball, I was more than pleasantly surprised at Empire. In fact, not to put too fine a pernt on it, kids, I thought it was a helluva piece of filmmaking. Enjoyed it enormously. Even said so to Mark Hamill who, if yo
u recall an interview he gave last year, was not terribly happy about my Star Wars remarks. Nice chap, actually. We had a cheery conversation. The war may be over, friends.)

  And I don’t think that it was because I saw the film in London, a town I dearly love, that the film impressed me so much. I think it’s a superlative job because of the director, Irvin Kershner. And I don’t think Kersh did a creatively sensitive job of expanding the concept and the content just because he’s the director Warner Bros. is trying to sign to direct my script of Asimov’s I, ROBOT. Would I be that shallow, come on!

  To tell the truth, I had nothing but feelings of utter trepidation when I first learned that Kershner wanted in on the I, Robot project.

  Back in 1961, when I first paid attention to Kershner’s work, on a film called The Hoodlum Priest, I thought he was a director to watch. Felt that even more strongly after seeing a film he directed in Canada with the late Robert Shaw called The Luck of Ginger Coffey, which was a superb piece of cinema. But as the years passed and Kersh added stinkers like Up the Sandbox, S*P*Y*S*, The Return of a Man Called Horse and the despicable Eyes of Laura Mars to his oeuvre, I came to think of him as a man who had done as much as he could, a man who would never hit the first rank of craftsmen.

  Then one director after another balked at the enormity of the project that I, Robot presented. Ridley Scott came to see me and wanted me to do the rewrite on Dune and I said no thank you, but offered him a look at I, Robot and he took it away with him and decided no. I wanted Carroll Ballard—director of The Black Stallion, an astonishing piece of work—but he was off in Italy and Switzerland and, though we talked long distance about it, and he finally saw the script, he said no to it, also.

  Then Eddie Lewis, the producer of the film, told me Irv Kershner had read my script and loved it and wanted to direct the film. And I panicked. Oh, God, no, I thought. Not the guy who directed The Eyes of Laura Mars, one of the most evil films of all time. Oh, help!

  But Kershner was the only director who wanted me back on the project. Warner Bros. was less than happy with me, for reasons that may well have been valid. Or might not. It’s late in the day and I’m not up to going into all that.

  So everybody said, “Kersh wants you back on this film. Go see what he did with The Empire. You’ll be amazed, it’s so good he’s the hottest director in the business.” And I swallowed hard because I’d hated Star Wars and I couldn’t see anyone, not even one of the six I mentioned earlier, doing enough with that sophomoric story to convince me I should be happy about someone potschky’ing with my beloved script, which had taken a year of my life to write. But Eddie Lewis said stop being a schmuck and go see the film, and Craig set it up in London for me, and I came out of the theater with a wide grin on my elfin countenance.

  And when Kersh called me and said let’s get together and talk about I, Robot, I was jubilant. And we did, and we did, and last week Variety and The Hollywood Reporter had a page one announcement that Warner Bros. had signed Irvin Kershner for the I, Robot project based on Harlan Ellison’s screenplay and it looks like that might even be a reasonably accurate statement of how things are—even though we all know out here that the “trades” as we call them usually run hype and idle wish-fulfillment.

  So I’m thinking about directors these days. I’m thinking about Ridley Scott, who has made two films that knocked me out, and I’m thinking about that hump lame who directed my Jack the Ripper script years ago; and I’m thinking about how the promise I saw in Kersh’s first films has suddenly, after a bleak interregnum, burgeoned anew; and about how I may, after all these dreary years of waiting for my scripts to be done decently, have finally lucked out.

  Because Irv Kershner talked to me not as if I was a beanfield peon, a scribbling toady with no stake in the creation of a beautiful thing that would enrich and uplift, a hack who would alter anything just to get the film made. He talked to me like a man who disavows the auteur theory.

  Which is why I’m feeling pretty damned good today.

  And just by way of closing, I’ll let you have that list of the six directors in the world. I don’t want any arguments about it. Don’t bother writing me saying I left out this one or that one, or how could I include such-and-such whose films you don’t understand. Just take the list and remember I’m never wrong, and shut up.

  And they are: Kurosawa, Altman, Coppola, Resnais, Buñuel, Kubrick, and Fellini.

  What’s that?

  That’s seven, not six?

  Well, jeezus, nobody’s perfect!

  INSTALLMENT 4: 20 JULY 80

  PUBLISHED 21 OCTOBER 80 FUTURE LIFE #23 COVER-DATED DECEMBER

  It was one of those weeks, gang. Finished the new novel; had a lady visit from England who refused to speak, so after three days of catalepsy I asked her to give Freddie Laker some return business and she went away (Ms. Marty Clark, my adroit and highly efficient Executive Secretary, opined that the Limey Lady was in awe of me and was thus rendered tabula rasa, or more precisely, tace; I have come to an irrevocable decision about that cop-out; for years I’ve heard disingenuous excuses for obdurate silence—shyness, didn’t know the people everyone was discussing, wasn’t familiar with the subject matter, felt uncomfortable in such a large crowd, felt uncomfortable in such a small, intimate crowd, in awe; have heard all those bullshit rationalizations and have come to the irrevocable conclusion that I’m not going to feel sorry for them mutes no more; not going to “try and draw them out,” not going to “try and pull them into the conversation,” not going to feel guilty or even the tiniest responsible for them; it’s their problem and it’s a kind of selfishness and attention seeking even worse than that practiced by those of us commonly referred to politely as “high verbals” or impolitely as “loudmouths”; just ain’t gonna slow down or cripple the good time talk with bright friends and snappy strangers to schlep some semi-narcoleptic self-server into a conversation clearly too fast and complex for him / her to dog-paddle through; piss on’m…and the snail they slithered in on); and I got knocked off the I, Robot movie project again. Even before I was rehired. Kershner told Warner Bros. he wouldn’t direct the film without me and they told him okay, take a hike; their words were (and this is an approximation, but veddy veddy close by reliable report), “We’ll close down the studio before we rehire Ellison.”

  So when I got the word, I told the producer, Eddie Lewis, and Kershner, go ahead and do it with another writer whom they’ll approve. It doesn’t upset me, oddly enough. I wrote the hell out of that script—took me a year to do it. They tried other writers once before…after I refused to do the nitwit revisions suggested by Warners. Three subsequent passes through the typewriters of three other writers, and each one, by report, was worse than the revision that preceded it. So they came back to me. Noise of 5′5′ Jewish writer chortling in glee.

  But I got the head of the studio pissed at me; had this alleged “story conference” with him a year or two ago, and discovered in the middle of the meeting that he hadn’t even read the screenplay he was advising me how to rewrite. Called him on it, proved to my satisfaction that all he was doing was spitting up bits and pieces of a synopsis one of his readers had given him; and he fumfuh’ed and harrumph’d and told me what a busy man he was; how he didn’t have time for little pisher problems such as reading the screenplay it had taken another human being a year to write, on a project his corporation was contemplating backing to the tune of forty million dollars; and I responded that not only wasn’t he functioning in any creative capacity but he wasn’t even being fiscally responsible; also suggested he had the intellectual and cranial capacity of an artichoke.

  Think I pissed him off.

  So this week Kersh and Eddie will have a group of (how shall I put this to avoid the redolence of blacklist?) more or less “acceptable” writers presented to them; and they’ll pick some dreg who’ll change the names in my script and try to think his / her way around the deranged inventiveness in my screenplay; and it’ll be muddled up again;
and when they’ve wasted another batch of thousandbuck months they’ll either shitcan the project as being “unworkable” or come back to me once more. If the latter, we can assume a certain sense of utter desperation. That, or a more pleasant concept, the executive in question will have been sent back to the mailroom of the showbiz agency from which he slithered lo these many moons ago.

  Ho-hum.

  And maybe Asimov’s I, ROBOT will get made; and maybe it won’t. As for me own widdle self, gang, I stand quietly up here on Elitist Mountain watching the clash by night of ignorant armies, as Matthew Arnold phrased it. (If the allusion escapes you, go look up “Dover Beach.”)

  All of which brings me around by the side portal to the more-or-less topic of this issue’s screed, which is: my readers.

  You see, I’m told that the executive in question isn’t ticked off at me just because I compared his ratiocinating abilities with those of a vegetable. He is even more mightily hacked at letters sent to him by “fans” to whom I appealed at an sf convention several years ago, to write polite letters to Warners suggesting they not make the robots in Asimov’s story-cycle cute little R2D2s. Should have known better.

  The letters—carbons of which I’ve seen—frequently began with such encomia as “Dear Asshole” or “Respected Tertiary Syphilis Victim.” And they spiraled down into snotty arrogance and idle threats from that already subterranean level.

  One should never ask sf fans to attempt a little Machiavellian manipulation. They have all the subtlety of an acrobat in a polio ward.

  Suffice to say, added to my own lack of tact, it suitably bent the executive in question, and his entire staff, so far out of shape that steaming them for a week wouldn’t have put the puff back in their egos.