Harlan Ellison's Watching (56 page)

So I will toss out all my notes on those films.

Happily will I heave a sigh of relief (and do I hear an echo from out there where you lie on your back gasping for surcease?) and let those earwigs, maggots, cockroaches and gnats live their brief lives in your theaters, never again to be available for swatting if you are smart and don't watch them on cable television.

I will go to another insect, with high recommendations. I will tell you that if you missed David Cronenberg's remake of
The Fly
(20th Century Fox), you missed one of the most exciting motion pictures of the year. Unlike
Invaders from Mars
, which began with dreck from its first version in 1953, and was recently remade in an updated, equally as
dreck
oid version,
The Fly
uses lovingly-remembered but nonetheless trivial material—the 1958 "Help me! Help me!" version and two abominable sequels (1959 & 1965)—to form a basis for Cronenberg's latest installment in his celluloid tract on the concept of the New Flesh.

What's that? A new filmic philosophy? Something we can buzz a word at? Oh, ripping, we all say . . . lay it on us, Oh Observer of Pop Art.

And I will. Next time. I want to discuss Cronenberg at length, because I've been sorta muttering for several years that of all the wise guy directors currently assaulting us, only Cronenberg has the intellectual virility and talent to become
sui generis
. In
Scanners, The Brood, Videodrome
and now
The Fly
, Cronenberg has leapfrogged his own triumphs and failures to become a director/writer with a voice and a view of the world that could be as important, in its own bizarre way, as that of Hitchcock, Ford, Wilder or Woody Allen.

But I need space for such a discussion, and next time I will allocate that space for myself, The Omnipresent Ferman permitting.

And until then, go to see Coppola's
Peggy Sue Got Married
(Tri-Star), written by Jerry Leichtling and Arlene Sarner, which is what
Back to the Future
wanted to be. It is almost exactly the same story, told from the viewpoint of a woman, rather than that of a simpy, affected, smartass Michael J. Fox; it is time travel and wish-fulfillment treated maturely, rather than simplistically and for yocks; it is adult and sincere and entertaining and everything right that
Back to the Future
did wrong. When I sat in that Hugo awards audience in Atlanta last Labor Day, and saw
Back to the Future
beat out
Brazil
for the statuette, I felt my heart sink. It was a travesty, and in that moment I hated those of you who voted for best film, condemning you in my mind to nothing better than
Back to the Future
. Ever!

But even the most benumbed of you must gleam in the eye of the universe, for you have been given a chance to see the error of your ways. It has been given to you, the possibility of actually comparing what-was with what-might-be. You can go to the theater and see
Peggy Sue Got Married
, waltz up the street to the video shoppe to rent
Back to the Future
, take it home, and compare—while the memory of
Peggy Sue
is still fresh—idiocy and counterfeit emotion and cheap laughs and adolescent bullshit with a mature dream entertainingly spun at proper length.

I cannot recommend
Peggy Sue Got Married
highly enough. I only hope when you make the comparison, that you have not been so hornswoggled that you cannot perceive the quantum leap in excellence and honesty between them.

Having now attempted to do some social work among the artistically impoverished, I go away to regain that sweetness of nature I once possessed, before having been slimed by ka-ka for what seems an eternity.

Hoping you are the same . . .

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/February 1987

So this toothless, wild-eyed old bag lady comes up to me on the street, and she grabs hold of my sleeve, and she says, "Once upon a time, in a land so far away and so miserably poor that they couldn't even afford a timezone, there lived an authentic Village Wretch whose chief social activities were cadging cantaloupe rinds and vomiting on people's shoes."

This went on for years (she continued, in an auctorial typographic device that relieved me of the burden of having to use quotation marks) until one day an upwardly-mobile wayfaring stranger came to town, and he looked around, and he decided there was room for a second-string, sort of wide-receiver Village Wretch; and he began cadging cantaloupe rinds and puking on people's shoes. He wasn't bad at it—something of a comer, everyone said—until one day he beat the original Village Wretch to an especially tasty cantaloupe rind, and then he yorked all over the penny loafers of the original Village Wretch, who made a big Who-Struck-John of it, brought the newcomer up on charges, and had him stoned to death.

She stood there staring at me, did the bag lady, as she concluded this touching tale of cottage industry; and I said, "What is the underlying moral of this
midrash
, a Seer of the Streets?"

And she said, "Give me two dollars and fifty cents or I will breathe Barbasol breath on you." So I gave it to her, and she slumped away, leaving me in an acute state of Anecdotus Interruptus; and I went about my business, deeply troubled in mind unto the Tenth Generation, until a few weeks ago when, at a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, west—on which I sit here in Hollywood until September when my term is up and I'll be set free—it came to me in full court press epiphany, what the breathtaking moral to her story had to be:

The person who screams the loudest at having his Bass Weejuns befouled (or his Ox Weejuns gored; whichever comes first), is the clown who's been besmirching yours for as far back as you can remember.

Which leads me to the controversial subject of the colorization of old movies, a topic much in the news these days, a burning topic that has film directors foaming at the mouth. So crazyfying is this new technological gimmick to the fratority of
auteurs
that on November 12th, when Ted Turner's SuperStation, WTBS in Atlanta, premiered the first showing of the "computer colorized" version of
The Maltese Falcon
, the Directors Guild of America (DGA) shlepped out the film's writer-director, John Huston, fitted with nose-breathing apparatus to alleviate his serious emphysema, for a press conference. All across America—and by satellite, one presumes, to the rest of the world—particularly to France where
cinéastes
look on this "advance" with the sort of approbation usually reserved for Quisling, Himmler and the Vichy government—the great John Huston could be seen on news broadcasts, referring to those who had altered his 1941 classic as pimps, thugs and molesters of children. The old man was not happy; and if Ted Turner ever gives a damn about
any
public opinion of his shenanigans, this little brouhaha bids fair to be the one that will give him the greatest pause.

(Let me interject that I am convinced that Turner, one of
Forbes
magazine's 400 wealthiest Americans, the kilowattage of whose hubris could light the entire length of the Autobahn for the rest of the century, a man given to invoking the name of God when he needs moral justification for one of his frequent unfriendly corporate takeover forays, cares as much about negative public opinion as a
yeti
does about a U-2 flyover.)

There sat the old man (himself once the cinematic voice of God), as bucolic-looking as Gregory Peck in
To Kill a Mockingbird
or Jimmy Stewart in
Anatomy of a Murder
, and he told us that Color Systems Technology, one of the two hi-tech film-painting companies responsible for the tinting of such perennials as
Yankee Doodle Dandy, Topper, Way Out West
and
Miracle on 34th Street
, had savaged a great example of film as High Art, a movie designed to be shot in black and white, to be seen in black and white, to be preserved for all time and all film lovers in black and white.

I did not disagree with his outrage, nor with his aesthetic judgments, nor with his passion. And if anyone has a right to an opinion on this matter, it is Huston. He not only directed
The Maltese Falcon
, he also wrote it.

No disagreement with Huston on Hammett's famous novel into film. Anyone who has ever seen it knows just how good American movies can be when they're done by men and women who combine talent and technique with high ethical behavior.

The Maltese Falcon
, as ordered up by Turner in response to surveys that told him a generation of
Porky's
-lovers won't stay tv-tuned to films in black and white, has all the filmic design order one finds in a Cobb salad. It looks like shit.

(And here's another nail for the coffin being readied for me by those who say I'm an Elitist. Who gives a damn if Turner's surveys are
right
?!) To hell with anyone loutish enough to need color to keep their minimal attention-span fixed through the commercials.
Casablanca
(which is supposed to be next on the paint-by-numbers hit list) and
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
and
His Girl Friday
and
It Happened One Night
were designed and art-directed for black and white. They have a unified look that is turned to spinach by colorization. Anyone loutish enough not to perceive that ought to be nailed to a movie seat and forced to watch endless reruns of
Top Gun
or
Monsignor
. And to hell with them.

So with agreement this strong, why was it that when Nicholas Meyer, a member of DGA and also one who sits on the Board of Directors of WGAw with me, solicited our vote in aid of condemning the colorization process, I spoke against the motion? Though I finally joined in with my brother and sister writers on the Board, supporting the denunciation with a unanimous vote, why was it that I raged against Nick's request in words and decibel-count usually expended on producers who seek to circumvent the terms of our Minimum Basic Agreement? How is it that one who shudders at a Bogart as Sam Spade with a head that glows pessary pink as if he had spent the night in a cyclotron, can argue against a motion that condemns the atrocious technique? And why is it that when we took a dinner break at that Board meeting, half a dozen other writers thanked me for what I'd said?

Surely it was because for the greater part of my, and their, lives we have been privileged to work at the noblest craft the human race ever devised. The job of writing.

What I said, unleashing an anger that has not abated in almost twenty-five years of working in film and television, is that I found it both ironic and insulting that directors—who have butchered, altered, emasculated, corrupted, revised and once in a while by chance even bettered the work of writers to suit their own egos or artistic visions, to appease and suck up to the even more gargantuan ego of actors, to toady to creatively-tone-deaf producers, to avoid accusations of being politically incorrect, to latch onto trends at the cost of story integrity, to warp the whole in deference to some current special effects technique, and nine times out of ten without asking the creator whether s/he approved of the hatchet job—have the gall, the temerity, the
chutzpah
, to ask writers to support their bleat of pain when
their
vaunted artistic vision has been savaged! Fuck us over for fifty years . . . and then come smiling the smile of the crocodile, seeking solidarity against the ravening minions of commercial transience. Announce to the world and
Cahiers du Cinéma
that they, the visionaries, the effectuators, the cathexians, are in fact the creators of the cinematic work, the
auteurs
, whole and lambently perfect in their overviewing wisdom; that the script is merely the "floor plan," the "blueprint," the rough materials from which they, in their photomontagic godhood, fashion the dreams that ennoble. Alter, for fifty years, what they wish, without regard to the primacy of interest of the writer who dreamed the dream in the first place; recast the role written for Sidney Greenstreet, to be played by Sammy Davis, Jr. in the more correct view of the God-Director; decide the linchpin speech of the protagonist, in which his entire character is limned, is unnecessary, is more "cinematic" encapsulated in a zoom shot into the narrowing eyes; put on the possessive credit before the title even if it was an original screenplay; go on
Entertainment Tonight
and describe how s/he and the lead players worked out the real story, rewriting all that awful dialogue on the set as they went along; exclude the writer from the rehearsals and make him/her chilly unwelcome on the set; do all that and more . . . and then come like Hansel or Gretel seeking bread crumbs to aid them in their trek through the nasty forest. Does this come down to a matter of personal pique? You'd damned well better believe it. Personal pique filtered through me by fifty and more years of honest writers and wage hacks, mad geniuses and simple craftspersons, great novelists taking a fling in films and kids who grew up with television wanting only to write movies. Pique channeled through me for all the uncountable hours of personal abuse, degradation, threats, arbitrary alterations, canceled contracts, lawsuits and lies told to the press and producers that it was because the
writer
did such a shitty job that the film was a dog, and that it was only because of heroic efforts of the flawless director that
anything
was salvaged! I speak here, and I spoke at that WGAw Board of Directors meeting for every writer who cried and tore hair and raged in the privacy of his or her home when s/he was taken off a film because s/he wouldn't knuckle under to the moronic demands of businessmen, conveyed through the director-posing-as-creator!