Harlan Ellison's Watching (57 page)

(Let me digress for a second. Not really a digression, but a statement about Nick Meyer.

(Nicholas Meyer is a writer of considerable distinction. A novelist and a scenarist whose body of work thus far commends him to the attention of anyone who thinks film is a serious art-form. As a director of such films as
The Day After, Time After Time, The Seven Percent Solution
and the second Star Trek movie, Nick has demonstrated both a wide eye and a keen sense in presenting material with rich subtexts. If I have differences with him on several of these films, they are based on glitches that are wholly my own, and which need not concern him, or you, ever.

(I'm not a friend of Nick Meyer's, and I'm definitely not an enemy of Nick Meyer. We are friendly acquaintances who have shared attendance at one dinner party, a number of evenings of WGAw Board meetings, some casual encounters at public functions, and similar political positions. From what I can tell, he's a good guy, and an honest man. I've already said I consider him a talented man. That I spoke against Nick's appeal at that meeting, had nothing to do with him. He was only the messenger and, I fear, he was only the guy who happened to be standing in the tunnel when the shrapnel hit.

(I wish to make this distinction clear, for him, and for my readers. As one who holds dual union credentials, in the DGA and the WGAw, it was absolutely appropriate for Nick Meyer to be the one to carry the appeal to us. Let no reader make the mistake of thinking that my anger and passion were intended as a manifestation of pique at Nick.)

No one who loves movies, no one who believes this is a legitimate art-form, no one who honors the work of the known and unknown thousands who have labored on films good and bad and merely mediocre, can approve of the colorization practice. I
had
to make that WGAw vote unanimous. It was not only the right thing to do, it was the
only
thing to do.

When the computerized coloring concept was first announced, some years ago, I thought it was at least intriguing. When the first film to be so treated was released, a pastelized rendering of one of my all-time favorites,
Topper
, I bought it and viewed it. It was so-so. Nothing very good there—I knew damned well that George and Marion Kerby's Hispano-Suiza (or whatever it is) was creamy white, not the bilious yellow someone had decided it ought to be—but nothing much terribly bad, either. It looked amateurish; it looked hastily processed; it looked like a diversion, in much the way one looks on 3-D: mildly amusing, but not worth taking seriously.

When they colored
Yankee Doodle Dandy
, even with Jimmy Cagney's glowing pink head like a balloon about to detach itself from his body, I couldn't get too worked up: I'd always seen the black and white film in color in my head, anyway. And I sorta supposed that if they'd considered it at the time it was being made, they might well have opted to do it in Technicolor. Certainly, if there was ever a b&w film that cried for color it was
Yankee Doodle Dandy
.

But when Turner came away from his brief ownership of MGM with a film library of great memories, that he then culled for one hundred films to be laid in the line of the moving Crayola, I became distressed. And now we see
The Maltese Falcon
, and now we understand that there were films intended for the chiaroscuro of magisterial design unity; and we realize that what Turner and his techno-thugs are doing is the rape of an American art treasure.

Apart from the sinister and deeply disturbing copyright questions even now being considered by the general counsel of the Copyright Office, even apart from all the aesthetic revulsion we feel, there is the problem of the marketplace. With colored versions of these films being played on free TV and wending their way to cable or pay-tv, the audience for these films in their pristine state will dwindle. Kids simply have no sense of history, and as they have been steadily brainwashed to accept nothing but roast beef red and car crashes, what will be the inducement for them to pay out money to go to the few art revival houses left in this country, to see a black and white version of, say,
Casablanca
, which they get for free on the little box and which they
know
oughtta be in color?

When I tell people that I still use a manual typewriter, not even an electric, much less a word-processor, they look at me as if I'm the king of the Luddites. Yet, it seems only sane and rational to me, that one adopts the level of technology that most conveniently permits one to produce the work at the highest level of craft, and eschews anything beyond that as merely playing with a new toy. I suppose that's the core of my objection to colorization. We don't really need it. The universe doesn't really
need
an aquatint rendering of those stark vistas and black and white emotions we know by heart from
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
. We do continue to need the arrangement of shadows out of which Bogart steps in
The Maltese Falcon
.

It's like going to see a club act in which a whistling dog performs "The Stars and Stripes Forever." Once, it's interesting; more than once it's merely a curiosity. That has very little, if anything, to do with art. And pandering to the corrupted tastes of a generation of kids for whom movies are nothing more than a prelude to getting laid, is loathsome in every way.

None of the foregoing withstanding, when Nick Meyer came to the Board and said, rally 'round the flag, boys and girls, even feeling as I do about this matter, my instant reaction was: big fuckin' deal!
Now
you're unhappy.
Now
you know how it feels. Too damned bad, directors. You are the ones who've done it to us with impunity forever, and now you squeal like pigs that they're doing it to you!

The Philistines have invaded your holy environs and you don't like it. But that won't stop you from continuing to do it to us. Because with the power to change, comes the power to demand more money, and artistic control, and devil take the hindmost . . . which has traditionally been the writers.

Whether the directors win this one, or lose this one, they've made the Writers Guild their bedfellow; but if there is even one writer out there who thinks that s/he can see the hideous parallel, who thinks that this will bring forth a wellspring of compassion for those of us who labor at the words before they ever see the project, then I submit that the writer ain't living in the same arena the rest: of us know.

The directors are having their ox gored by a man even more ruthless, even crasser than they. And dem widdle folkses doesn't wuv it even a widdle. To which reaction I fear I can display very little compassion. Good, I say! Good, you fat-assed bunch of self-anointed Michelangelos. Suffer, mudderfuggers! Get just a tiny taste of the bile we have to swallow every day, on every job, in Hollywood.

You got us to go along with you this time, because it is a terrible thing. For directors, for writers, for film lovers of all times and all places.

But do try to remember why you felt so badly, and how it felt, during this first, brief moment of your inconvenience. Because it is what lies at the heart of why so many of us hate so many of you.

Color you blue right now. Color us crimson always.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/April 1987

I'm at 30,000 feet aboard United flight 104, on my way to speak at a seminar on the creation of the universe (about which, you may be certain, I know even less than you) in company with Sir Fred Hoyle and Robert Jastrow at the University of Rochester; and as fear of making a total buffoon of myself has rendered me
tabula rasa
on the subject, precluding preparation of salient remarks, my mind is ratlike scurrying toward anything but the creation of the universe, so whatthehell, why don't I write this overdue column instead; and most of all I'm thinking, mostly, about my friend Walter Koenig who is not speaking to me at the moment.

My friend Walter is a writer of screenplays, a fine teacher of acting, a collector of Big Little Books, and an actor who, for twenty years, has assayed the role of Ensign (now Lt.-Commander) Chekov on a television series, and in a quartet of motion pictures, generically known as
Star Trek
. A series and films with which many of you may be familiar. (I say may be familiar because, of late, things have gotten even worse than I'd imagined them to be, cultural memorywise. I mentioned all-chocolate Necco Wafers to a bunch of people in their early twenties the other day, and they looked at me blankly. That, added to the fact that on my
Hour 25
radio show, during an interview with the talented artist Phil Foglio, he admitted he'd
heard
the phrase "civil rights" but didn't really know what the Civil Rights Act of 1964 alluded to, has given me pause. Thus have the Sixties and their history been flensed from the world in the minds of those under forty. So I take
nothing
for granted any more.)

Now Walter being pissed at me may not, at first blush, seem to be fit fodder for philippic, but the
reason
he's pissed at me, the shadowy philosophical subtext of our minor contretemps, ties in with a few random thoughts about the new film
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home
(Paramount), which Walter arranged for me to see a few weeks ago, as I fly overhead writing this.

A momentary pause. A short while ago I promised you a long column analyzing and praising the films that David Cronenberg has directed. I'm working on it. Mr. Cronenberg has made available to me cassettes of his earliest, most-difficult-to-Iocate films (
Stereo
, made when he was 26 years old;
Crimes of the Future
from 1970;
The Parasite Murders—
which you may know either as
Shivers
or
They Came from Within—
and the uncut version of
The Brood
), and I am going at this essay with care and measured reason. It will be along shortly. Last time I ventured some thoughts on the coloring of films. Since that column—which has caused some small stir in the film community, including a spirited essay of response even
before
my column saw print, from screenwriter/director Nicholas Meyer, in the L.A.
Times—
I have learned of even more horrifying technology about to be brought to bear on classic films now in the clutches of Ted Turner, and I am amassing data on same with director Joe Dante, in preparation for a follow-up column. That one should blow your socks off, and I expect if all goes well it will be my next installment. I haven't lost my place, as you might have suspicioned: I am simply trying to develop a sense of punctiliousness in my declining years. I tell you this to forestall
kvetching
.

So Walter isn't speaking to me.

That isn't unusual. Since the evening in 1963 when I met Walter on the Universal Studios backlot "New York street" where the
Alfred Hitchcock Hour
was filming my "Memo from Purgatory" teleplay, he has sent me to Coventry many times, occasionally even for just cause. I am not permitted to get angry with Walter, that isn't in the contract; so I am not pissed at Walter; but since I don't deserve his animus this time, I have decided to wait until he apologizes for being such a poop. Nonetheless, the circumstances by which this crankiness developed, and the subtext which is more than slightly intriguing, prove germane to a theory about
Star Trek
that I've worked out exhaustively since I first thought of it way back, oh an hour ago, will this flight
never
end?!?

Presumably because I asked for $500,000 to write the screenplay of
Star Trek IV
when I met with Leonard Nimoy and Harve Bennett on Friday, January 25th, 1985—on the grounds that if I had to write for Shatner, if I had to write in a part for Eddie Murphy, if I would have to face the imbroglio of others wanting to share screen credit with me, if I was going to have to put up with the
tsuriss
I knew would be attendant on
any
involvement with Paramount and its peculiar attitude toward the
Star Trek
films, I would have to be compensated in heavy balance—a demand that was greeted first with disbelief, then consternation, then with disdain, and finally with utter rejection (as sane a decision as ever Paramount made), I was never invited to a prerelease screening of the movie.

I mentioned having been "overlooked" during a conversation with Walter, and he thereafter broke his hump getting me comped into the Cinerama Dome. Not an easy thing to do.

A day or so later, when I called Walter to thank him for his efforts, I made some casual remarks about my reaction to the film—which were positive—not foamingly laudatory, but positive, about which more in a moment—but the main reason I'd called was to urge him to get into the queue for script assignments on the newly-proposed return of
Star Trek
as a television series for syndication, with an all-new cast. We talked about that for a few minutes and then, with an edge in his voice, Walter said, "Okay, so what did you think of my performance?"

For an instant I was thrown off-balance. The subject had been changed without warning. And I answered quickly, with what I consider honesty and candor, "It was fine. I said I thought it was the best ensemble work from the regulars that I'd seen in any of the four films, remember? They didn't give you quite as much to do in this one as they did in
Star Trek II
, but it was a lot more onscreen time than you got in the first or third films. And what you did, I liked. You know. You did Chekov, and you did him just fine."