Created By
Authors: Richard Matheson
PRAISE FOR
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON’S
CREATED BY
“As I read
Created By
, my life flashed before me (only sexier), Paddy Chayefsky rolled over in his grave, and television’s A-list frantically searched their offices for the hidden cameras Richard Christian Matheson surely placed there.”
—Brandon Tartikoff, former president of NBC
and former president of Paramount Pictures
“Part fantasy, part paranoia, part tongue-in-cheek putdown of pop culture,
Created By
… bites like a vampire.”
—Daily News
, New York
“[Created By]
is truly a novel of its time.… Set in steamy ’90s Hollywood, its language is the dialect of the deal, the free association shared among minds with the attention span of half a sentence.… [Matheson is] exploring, among other things, the relationship between television violence and our own thoughts and behavior—and Hollywood’s cynical use of that relationship.”
—San Jose Mercury News
“A great, supernatural thriller.”
—Richard Donner, director of
Lethal Weapon
(1,2,3) and
The Omen
“Richard Christian Matheson’s powerful novel is a macabre fantasy in the tradition of Edgar Allan Poe, and dead-on in its portrayal of contemporary television. The book will haunt you, as it did me, long after you’ve put it down.”
—William Friedkin, director of
The Exorcist
,
The French Connection
, and
To Live and Die in L.A.
“Matheson excels magnificently. A great read with finely etched characters and a dry, sardonic wit. I’m jealous.”
—Stephen J. Cannell
“This book is like a heat-seeking missile going right for the flesh of the television business and searing it off the bone. I feel as though I know Alan White … as a matter of fact, I may have once been married to him.”
—Barbara Corday, former president of Columbia Pictures Television and former vice president of CBS in charge of prime-time programs
“Awash in Tinseltown glitz and hypocrisy,
Created By
drags us behind the scenes into a world where no one is worth any more than his or her latest success. It’s a world where the sharks and monsters of the business world are about to meet up with the genuine article, and where the creator of what can accurately be called a ‘monster hit’ is learning the true meaning of that term. This is a novel that grabs you immediately and refuses to let go.”
—West Coast Review of Books
“One of the most exciting books I’ve read in the last five years.… Every studio should be dying to buy it—if they’re not too frightened of the truth.”
—Aaron Spelling
This is a work of fiction. Any references to real people, places, organizations, and entities are intended only to give the novel a sense of reality and authenticity. Other names, characters, entities, and incidents depicted in the novel either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.
CREATED BY
A Bantam Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Bantam hardcover edition published October 1993
Bantam paperback edition/September 1994
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the excerpt from “EVERYONE’S GONE TO THE MOVIES.” Words and Music by WALTER BECKER and DONALD FAGEN. © Copyright 1973 by WINGATE MUSIC CORP. All Rights Controlled and Administered by MCA MUSIC PUBLISHING, A Division of MCA INC, New York, NY 10019.
USED BY PERMISSION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1993 by Richard Christian Matheson.
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-3693.
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information address: Bantam Books.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78873-3
Bantam Books are published by Bantam Books, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc. Its trademark, consisting of the words “Bantam Books” and the portrayal of a rooster, is Registered in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and in other countries. Marca Registrada. Bantam Books, 1540 Broadway, New York, New York 10036.
v3.1
For my father, Richard.
My remarkable teacher and friend.
My brilliant inspiration.
I love you.
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
Deep appreciation to Pat LoBrutto, whose passion helped bring this book to life. Thanks, pal. Many thanks to my editor, Lou Aronica, for a highly perceptive eye and abundant humor. More to Jennifer Hershey, for patience, taste and thoughtfulness. And to Binky Urban and Heather Schroder for impeccable instincts, all the way around.
A final thanks is in order. I’d like to acknowledge some of the writers I worked with in television who shared a gift: Thomas Szollosi, Kenneth Johnson, Oliver and Elizabeth Hailey, George Kirgo, Nick Corea, Donald Bellisario, Andrew Schneider, Dinah and Julie Kirgo, Jerry Davis, Tony and Nancy Lawrence, Babs Greyhosky, Harve Bennett, Renee and Harry Longstreet, Karen Harris, Bill Sandefur, Herb Wright, Steven E. DeSouza, David Frankel, Sid Ellis, James Hirsch, Frank Lupo, Patrick Hasburgh, Gy Waldron, Lynn Montgomery, Barbara Corday, Norman Steinberg, Steven Spielberg, Aaron Spelling, and most of all Stephen J. Cannell.
“The adage in television is that the fluke is the hit.”
Brandon Tartikoff
,
Former President of NBC
“One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.”
C. G. Jung
“Everyone’s gone to the movies, now we’re alone at last …”
Steely Dan
C
OMING
A
TTRACTION
Q. With “Hill Street” and “L.A. Law” you have really pushed the line as far as what you can do on network television.
A. We’re going to go farther.
Q. You don’t think that you’ve already gone further than any other show?
A. Yeah. But not enough. I want more. I think that you’re going to see all kinds of things in the next half-dozen years on television that you can’t even imagine today.
Excerpt from interview with producer/writer Steven Bochco, July-August 1988
American Film
May 12
Los Angeles
W
hat is it? I’m getting something?”
Alan smiled. Maybe she was as incredible as everyone had said. He’d been sitting with her for five minutes and it was happening: the top-hat-zap.
“I’m not sure. The new pilot, I suppose.” Alan made a nervous face. It was borderline creepy hanging out with this broad. The way she sat there, staring.
Watching.
The trappings weren’t much, sure. Just a hold-it-in-your-hand condo in a so-so part of town. The whole dinky place had a blown-up Vegas swap-meet look and there was velvet everything. Cruddy art, too. Piles and piles of that ultrabrocade, Liberace nightmare stuff. As they talked, Alan couldn’t ignore a swag lamp that hung overhead, golden cupids encaged by cat gut that dripped glycerine in slo-mo. Sort of the tacky tears of time trickling into
schmaltzy eternity. Nearby, the electric Elvis air freshener hummed.
Not at all the right setting for a famous psychic. Rich oil sheiks sought out this woman. Incredibly wealthy celebrities. Major league ball players having bad seasons. Lovers who feared defection. Terminal disease sufferers. Gamblers. They all came. Filled with wonder and hope. Lots of hope.
All the guys at Paramount who’d gone told Alan they swore by her. Absolutely fucking swore. As in the Holy Virgin or even J.C. himself. The faith ran that deep. Maybe even deeper when you got right down to it.
Shows that were going to have legs or ones that were fated to be flushed. It didn’t matter. She
knew.
She could pin it just like the gas man reads your meter. That’s how weird it really was. One felt more than vaguely naked.
And her specialty was picking shows. She’d even been on big salary with one of the networks to do that very thing. They sat her every day in a hidden little office and let her look at pilot proposals, pilot scripts, casting ideas, you name it. And, man, she had the fucking touch.
She’d seen Bell’s pilot “Mike and Pooky” two seasons back and loved it. Watched the whole half-inch cassette in her office at the network H.Q. in L.A. and laughed her head off. Loved it. Dialogue. Pacing. Acting. Action. It was all there, ready to roar like a rocket.
And when the suits marched in with tasseled feet and asked her what she thought, she said it didn’t have a chance in hell. Three and out. Maybe four.
Her visions had been a kindness.
“Mike and Pooky” got creamed first two weeks
against some old Sly movies the other networks put in America’s face.
After a month, the network pulled the plug. No chance to catch on. Find its audience. Bell had freaked. All his Emmys, Humanitas, and WGA chrome, brass, and crystal didn’t make a bit of difference. That’s what was so fucking crazy. Didn’t matter if you had a star that tested out better than sex. Didn’t matter if you had a premise that was plated at the mint. None of it mattered.
