Harlan Ellison's Watching (70 page)

Neither in the nine years between the murder of Kitty Genovese and the writing of "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," nor in the fifteen years since its publication, did it ever occur to me that I would someday have to explain
who
Kitty Genovese was, why her death was (and remains) a modern, urban horror of the most paralyzing sort, or what it was about that slaying that so obsessed me that I would be driven to write a story that to this day frightens me no less than at the moment I completed it; a story that I think is the most chilling thing I've ever written.

I would have instantly dismissed such a silly thought. To forget Kitty Genovese and the cultural icon she became, would be as impossible as forgetting the mythic origins of Jack the Ripper, Dr. Crippen, Gilles de Rais, Sawney Beane, Charles Manson, Lee Harvey Oswald or John Dillinger. Nothing less than unthinkable!

But a terrible cultural amnesia assails us, and young people today seem to learn no history in their schools; and that which they learn they forget immediately after their spot quizzes. The Korean War is as misty in the public mind as the Wars of the Roses.

The National Endowment for the Humanities recently released a report mandated by Congress entitled
American Memory
, which indicates that while our students may be great at analyzing, contemplating, reasoning, in short, "thinking," their education has not given them very much to think
about
. Method, in our public schools and universities, has been emphasized over content. Teachers, themselves, are rewarded for "process" more than knowledge of anything in particular.

A survey of more than eight thousand seventeen-year-old Americans last Spring revealed that 68% had no idea in what half-century the American Civil War had taken place. 69% didn't know what the Magna Carta was. Hardly any of them knew who Chaucer, Cervantes, Dante or Dostoevsky were. Many were dimly aware that Columbus is alleged to have discovered America first, but they didn't have a clue in what year. History as a required subject has virtually vanished from school curricula, lumped in haphazardly as "Social Studies"; geography hasn't been taught in many of our schools in years; English courses are transformed into something called "Language Arts"; and don't even think about what vast gaps in historical and scientific knowledge are caused by the ever-present specter of the Fundamentalists.

According to Lynn Chancy, Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, most elementary reading texts contain little literature, and instead of learning about George Washington, Joan of Arc or King Arthur, children are subjected to dry, contemporary prose aimed at teaching such skills as how to make out grocery lists, how to give change, and how to use a telephone book.

And even though I know all of the preceding to be tragically true, and probably woefully understated as to the
real
severity of the problem of widespread ignorance, it never occurred to me that I would have to explain who Kitty Genovese was.

But in the past six months I've received two or three letters from readers frightened and mesmerized by "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," asking me how I'd thought up such a scarifying idea. There was even a reader who wrote in to the
Comic Buyer's Guide
, who had read the story, and had come across a variation on the Genovese slaying in some comic book or other, and wanted to know who had ripped off whom. (Fortunately, the editors of
CBG
, Don and Maggie Thompson, knew the referent, and they attempted to provide a background for that hapless product of the American Educational System.) And so, it is with heavy heart that I have prefaced the snippets of screenplay that follow with snippets of history not that old . . . bits of tragic real-life I never thought would grow dim in the minds of people who swore Kitty Genovese had not been murdered in vain. (And how many of you subscribe to
The Underground Grammarian
of R. Mitchell? Which may seem to be a
non sequitur
, but if you go to your nearest library and check it out, you'll see I'm only being purposefully obtuse in your best interests.)

But in 1977, when Billy Friedkin brought me to Paris to turn "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" into a film of terror that spoke to the violence of cities, the omen that Kitty Genovese had become, an omen of slasher films we take for granted only a decade later, was as bright as the blood on a knife blade.

It's a shame time constraints killed the project . . .

The production entity that had bankrolled Friedkin's deal, put me in breach; standard operating procedure. The film, therefore, would not be made. No one's fault but mine . . . and time. With which I've had problems before. But . . .

While in Paris, I wrote three visual openings for the screenplay. They are sequences intended to set the tone for the film, this ugly, mean horror-fantasy about evil in big cities. If you look up the short story, then the subliminal thrust of these openings will link for you.

They are three very different openings, yet each one goes to the thematic core of the story. I have arranged them in order of preference, from least desirable to most appealing. They are offered as examples of the way in which a writer of books and stories can adapt him-or herself to writing for motion pictures.

It's a matter of thinking visually.

Offered as addenda to these essays, in which I extoll the art and craft of screenwriting, for those few of you who may never have had the chance to enjoy the visual magic endemic to that special form of fantastic literature.

Offered as a sorta kinda bonus column, so you won't feel cheated out of your chosen portion of
Watching
. And I would be less than forthright with you were I not to add this:

Quite a few years ago I rancorously resigned from membership in Science Fiction Writers of America, an organization that I helped to found and which, in the capacity of its first Vice-President, I served. I resigned because the membership at large decided, in its wisdom, to drop the Nebula category of Best Dramatic Presentation.

I'll not go into the affront to SFWA's members who work in
both
film and books that this action proffered. Nor will I dwell on the horrors that resulted from SFWA having previously given Nebulas not to the author(s) of notable screenplays, but to the finished, collaborative films—and being pissed-off when Woody Allen didn't come to the Banquet to accept the award—rather than understanding that what scenarists do is different from what novelists do, and that the best screenplay category should have been judged not by a large membership to whom the scripts were unavailable, but by a blue ribbon panel changed from year to year, a panel that would scrutinize the
written words
. That's
really
ancient history. So I won't go into all that.

But this year, my screenplay based on Isaac Asimov's
I, Robot
cycle of stories (an unproduced film that exists
only
as the written word) has garnered a number of recommendations for the Nebula in the category of Best Novel. (Well, the form of it may be different from the standard novel, but it is about 100,000 novel-length words; and it appeared as a serial in a competitor to this journal you now read; and the Nebula Awards Committee judged it eligible.) So for the first time, a work written to be filmed, rather than published between covers, has a chance to demonstrate to a frequently-irrational stick-in-the-mud constituency that—out of ignorance, I presume—their out of hand and off the wall dismissal of filmwriting has been a tunnel-visioned kind of snobbery as outdated and jejune as that of the land warfare experts who
knew
the Maginot Line was unbreachable, or the cavalry supporters who sneered at the possibility that air power would forever alter the forms of waging war. This effete dismissal of screen writing by a cadre of writers concretized in their thinking serves two non-productive ends:

First, it perpetuates an almost hayseed attitude, provincial and purblind; rooted in a fearfully uneducated perception of the film industry as
Terra Incognita
: a land of savages and arrivistes lying in wait for the unwary sf writer; slavering Philistines who debased and crushed the souls of Scott Fitzgerald and Nathanael West and William Faulkner and Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Parker, and wasted their talent; a place of goofy non-writing in which no self-respecting "sci-fi guy" would deign to soil his/her pristine perfection. (A pristine perfection that is apparently unsullied by the penning of paperback adaptations of hack, commercial movies; cheap horror novels chiefly distinguished and distinguishable one from another by embossed foil covers featuring fangs dripping blood and demon children brandishing meat cleavers; Tolkien and Malory ripoffs awash with elfin creatures and swordspersons with unpronounceable names forever on the road in search of mystic jewels, coronets of kingship or keys to alternate universes; and endless one-note ideas meretriciously bloated for the tawdriest commercial reasons into trilogy, quartet, sextet, octology, nonology and dekalogy. It escapes me how working in film could be any more witless or talent-bashing than what these literary elitists do for low advances and specious career motives.)

But this reiteration of yokel mythology about Cloud Cuckoo Land spreads a miasma of trepidation and booga-booga boogeymen that deters good writers in our genre from attempting to work in the screenplay form. In this way, they are relegated to writing only in the printed media, and they are cut off not only from a salutary expansion of their talents—writing for film hones the visual sense better than any other exercise I've ever come across, in the way photography sharpens the eye of the painter—but from the vast sums of money and the pleasures of filming attendant on such projects.

As for Hollywood crushing the sensitive blossom of a writer's abilities, "Pep" West wrote what was unarguably his finest novel,
The Day of the Locust
, during the five years in which he flourished as a successful studio scenarist, and would no doubt have continued his brilliant auctorial career had he not stupidly snuffed out his life (and that of his wife, Eileen McKinney) in a senseless car accident resulting from a penchant for speeding, which had caused rollovers and warnings from friends previously; Scott Fitzgerald's "Pat Hobby" stories, written while he sank lower and lower in Hollywood due to alcoholism and the deteriorating mental condition of Zelda, may not be the apex of his writing (though they remain charmingly antic and mordant despite the pecksniffian cavils of quite another set of literary elitists), but it
was
writing done in Hollywood while he worked at the studios (ineptly, it turns out), and don't forget he put together almost all of
The Last Tycoon
, which many scholars contend would have been his most mature work, while being "destroyed" by Tinseltown; Faulkner's studio work supported his wife, his family, his lover and himself while he turned out brilliant novels that were critically acclaimed, but were not bookstall runaways, and in that way his screen writing was like a day job, freeing him financially to indulge his muse as sybaritically as he wished in books.

As Saul Bellow has pointed out: "Writers are not necessarily corrupted by money. They are distracted—diverted to other avenues."

As living testimony to this, may I point out that whatever you, dear reader, think of my writing—pro or con—almost
all
of what I have done that is of worth has been done right here in Hollywood, where I have lived happily for twenty-six years. There is no deep secret to it, not for me, not for Fitzgerald, not for Michael Crichton or George R. R. Martin or for Richard Matheson. It is commonsense. If one retains a sense of one's literary worth, and writes for film with the same punctiliousness brought to the books and stories, one can live decently and have all the time one wishes to write books that challenge and explore the limits of one's talent . . . rather than signing on to do yet another furry-footed fantasy for a paperback publisher whose already overloaded schedule guarantees that the book it took you six months or a year to write will get a mingy six days of display and then be stripped and returned for credit, effectively putting a year of hard work out-of-print almost before it's been published.

But because of the widespread Accepted Wisdom of writers who, in their imperial fiat, deigned to kill the Best Dramatic Presentation Nebula, many sf/ fantasy writers who could move comfortably and profitably between film and books look toward the West Coast as if it were the Bermuda Triangle.

Which brings me to the second non-productive aspect of the matter. Because the people who
could
and
should
be doing films of the fantastic are frightened away from the medium, the jobs fall into the clutches of hacks and parvenus who think an alien invasion is a fresh idea. And we all suffer. Because they write shitty films.

The producers don't know any better. They aren't conversant with the fecundity of imagination regularly demonstrated in the genre, so they can't be blamed for thinking the dusty old stuff they're getting is fresh and innovative. Nor can they really be blamed for buying plagiaristic, watered-down ideas stolen from the best of our people (see column #30). They know no better.

By eschewing jobs in feature films, sf/fantasy writers abandon the field of creative battle to the hypesters and ex-talent agency mailroom boys who become "writers." And what results I review here regularly, with hysteria and disgust.

The days in which there were only Beaumont, Bloch, Matheson, Ellison, Gerrold, Crais and a few others writing films, are gone. John Varley works here. So does George R. R. Martin. And Steven Barnes and John Shirley and Norman Spinrad and Thomas Disch (to greater or lesser degree of involvement), to name just a few.