Stalking the Nightmare (28 page)

But as I sat there in Los Angeles writing my script, I received a call from Mr. Klenman, who was at that moment in Vancouver. “Mr. Ellison,” he said, politely enough, “this is Norman Klenman. Bill Davidson wanted me to call you about
The Starlost.
I’ve read your bible and, frankly, I find it very difficult and confusing … I don’t understand science fiction … but if you want to train me, and pay me the top-of-the-show money the Guild just struck for, I’ll be glad to take a crack at a script for you.” I thanked him and said I’d get back to him when I’d saved my protagonist from peril at the end of act four.

When I walked off the show, the man they hired not only as story editor to replace me, but to rewrite
my
script, as well, was Norman Klenman who “don’t understand science fiction.”

My walkout on my brain child, and all that pretty fame and prettier money was well in the wind by the time of Klenman’s call, but I was still intending to write the scripts I’d contracted for,

when the following incidents happened, and I knew it was all destined for the ashcan.

I was in Dallas. Guest of honor at a convention where I was trying to summon up the gall to say
The Starlost
would be a dynamite series. I was paged in the lobby. Phone call from Toronto. It was Bill Davidson. The conversation describes better than ten thousand more words what was wrong with the series:

“Major problems, Harlan,” Davidson said. Panic lived in his voice.

“Okay, tell me what’s the matter,” I said.

“We can’t shoot a 50-mile-in-diameter biosphere on the ship.”

“Why?”

“Because it looks all fuzzy on the horizon.”

“Look out the window, Bill. Everything
is
fuzzy on the horizon.”

“Yeah, but on TV it all gets muddy in the background. We’re going to have to make it a 6-mile biosphere.”

“Whaaaat?!”

“Six miles is the best we can do.”

There is a pivotal element in the pilot script where the hero manages to hide out from a lynch mob. In a 50-mile biosphere that was possible. In a 6-mile biosphere all they had to do was link arms and walk across it. “But, Bill, that means I’ll have to rewrite the entire script.”

“Well, that’s the best we can do.”

Then, in a blinding moment of
satori
I realized Davidson was wrong, dead wrong; his thinking was so limited he was willing to scrap the logic of the script rather than think it through. “Bill,” I said, “who can tell the difference on a TV screen, whether the horizon is six miles away or fifty? And since we’re showing them an enclosed world that’s never existed before, why
shouldn’t
it look like that! Shoot
de facto
six miles and call it fifty; it doesn’t make any damned difference!”

There was a pause, then, “I never thought of that.”

Only one indication of the unimaginative, hidebound and obstinately arrogant thinking that emerged from total unfamiliarity with the subject, proceeded through mistake after mistake, and foundered on the rocks of inability to admit confusion.

The conversation went on with Davidson telling me that even if Trumbull’s effects didn’t work and they couldn’t shoot a 50-mile biosphere—after he’d just admitted that it didn’t matter
what
distance they said they were showing—I’d simply
love
the set they were building of the control room.

“You’re building the
control
room?” I said, aghast with confusion and disbelief. “But you won’t need that till the last segment of the series. Why are you building it now?”

(It should be noted that one of the Maltese Falcons of the series, one of the prime mysteries, is the location of the control room biosphere. When they find it, they can put the ark back on course. If they find it in the first segment, it automatically becomes the shortest TV series in history.)

“Because you had it in your bible,” he explained.

“That was intended to show how the series
ended,
for God’s sake!” I admit I was screaming at that point. “If they find it first time out, we can all pack our bags and play an hour of recorded organ music!”

“No, no,” Davidson argued, “they still have to find the back-up computer, don’t they?”

“Aaaaarghh,” I aaaaarghhed. “Do you have even the faintest scintilla of an idea what a backup control
is?”

“Uh, I’m not certain. Isn’t it the computer at the back of the ship?”

“It’s a fail-safe system, you drooling imbecile; it’s what they use if the primary fails. The primary is the control… oh to hell with it!” I hung up.

When I returned to Los Angeles, I found matters had degenerated even further. They were shooting a 6-mile biosphere and
calling
it six miles. They said no one would notice the discrepancy in the plot. They were building the control room, with that arrogant ignorance that could not be argued with. Ben Bova, who was the technical advisor, had warned them they were going about it in the wrong way; they nodded their heads … and ignored him.

Then Klenman rewrote me. Oh boy.

As an indication of the level of mediocrity they were seeking, “Phoenix Without Ashes” had been retitled, in one of the great artistic strokes of all time, “Voyage of Discovery.” I sent them word they would have to take my name off the show as creator and as writer of that segment. But they would have to use my pseudonym, to protect my royalties and residuals. (They had screwed up my creation, but I’d be damned if I’d let them profit from the rape.)

Davidson reluctantly agreed. He knew the Writers Guild contract guaranteed me that one last weapon. “What’s your pen-name, we’ll use it, what is it?”

“Cordwainer Bird,” I said. “That’s b-i-r-d, as in ‘for the birds.’”

Now
he
was screaming. He swore they’d fight me, they’d never use it, I was denying them the use of my name that was so valuable with science fiction fans. Never! Never!

God bless the Writers Guild.

If you tuned in the show before it vanished from all earthly ken you saw a solo credit card that said CREATED BY CORDWAINER BIRD and that’s your humble servant saying the Visigoths won again.

Bova walked off the series the week after Trumbull left, because of scientific illiteracies he’d warned them against, such as “radiation virus” (which is an impossibility … radiation is a matter of atoms, viruses are biological entities, even as you and I and Kline and Davidson, I presume), “space senility” (which, I guess means old, feeble, blathering vacuum), and “solar star” (which is a terrific illiterate redundancy like saying “I live in a big house home”).

The Starlost
came up a loser, as do
most
TV series. Because they don’t understand the materials with which they have to work, because they are so tunnel-visioned into thinking every dramatic series can be transliterated from the prosaic and overfamiliar materials of cop, doctor and cowboy shows, because there was so much money to be skimmed … another attempt at putting something fresh and innovative on the little screen came up a loser.

Is mine an isolated bit of history? A case of sour grapes attributable to the intransigent nature of a writer whose credentials come red-stamped with the warning that he is a troublemaker? Hardly.

In
TV Guide
in October of 1964 the excellent Merle Miller told in detail how his series
Calhoun
had come a cropper. In February of 1971, again in
TV Guide,
the well-known sf author and historian James Gunn related how they leavened and dumbed
The Immortal
out of existence after fifteen weeks. Through the years, right up to the 1981 anthology series
Dark Room—
suicidally placed opposite first
The Dukes of Hazzard
and then moved to a primetime spot facing
Dallas
by ABC—which was canceled after six airings, the story is the same. This time it was my turn, that’s all.

Have you, gentle reader, learned anything from this
angst?
Probably not. Viewers seem not to care about authenticity, accuracy, logic, literacy, inventiveness. Friends call me when they see reruns of
The Starlost
in Canada, and they tell me how much they like it. I snarl and hang up on them.

The upshot of all the foregoing was precisely what I had predicted when I cut out of that deranged scene. NBC had gone into the series with a guarantee of sixteen episodes firm, and an almost guaranteed pickup option for eight more. But the ratings were so low, in virtually every city where the series was aired—sometimes running opposite the nine thousandth rerun of
I Love Lucy
or scintillating segments of
Zen Archery for the Millions—
that NBC bailed out after the first sixteen.

The shows were so disgracefully inept, so badly acted, uniformly directed with the plunging breakneck pace of a quadruple amputee crossing a busy intersection, based in confusion and plotted on the level of a McGuffey’s primer … that when the show was canceled after sixteen weeks, there were viewers who never knew it was missing.

When it was dumped, and I got the word from a contact at the network, I called one of Kline’s toadies, and caroled my delight. “What the hell are
you
so damned happy about,” he said, “you just lost a total of $93,000 in participation profits.”

“It’s
worth
ninety-three thousand bucks to see you fuckers go down the toilet,” I said.

But even though I fell down that rabbit-hole in TV Land and found, like Dorothy, that it wasn’t Kansas, or any other place that resembled the real world, I have had several moments of bright and lovely retribution-cum-vindication.

At one point, when the roof started falling in on them, they called Gene Roddenberry, the successful creator of
Star Trek,
and they offered him fifty per cent of the show if he’d come up and produce the show out of trouble for them. Gene laughed at them and said what did he need fifty per cent of a loser for, he had a hundred per cent of two winners of his own. They said they could understand that, but did he have someone else in mind he could recommend as producer? Gene said, sure he did.

They made the mistake of asking him who.

He said, “Harlan Ellison. If you hadn’t fucked him over so badly, he could have done a good job for you.”

Then
he
hung up on them.

Which is just what the viewers did.

The second bright moment was when the trial board of the Writers Guild judged me Not Guilty of scabbing. It was a unanimous decision by some of the finest writers in Hollywood, and I was reinstated on the WGAw Board of Directors thereafter. Nonetheless, were I ever to forgive the thugs and fools who took the labor of a year and corrupted it so completely that I felt nothing but shame and fury for a long time after, I can never forgive them for placing me in such jeopardy with the craft guild to which I proudly belong. More than likely, had my efforts to thwart and circumvent 20th Century-Fox’s anti-strike efforts in producing the series not been so blatant, and so infuriatingly effective to Kline and his superiors, I might well have been tagged with that most vile and inexcusable sobriquet: scab. There is no forgiveness in me for that part of the monstrous history of
The Starlost.

But the brightest moment of all came on March 21st, 1974 when I became the first person in the history of the Writers Guild of America to win the Most Outstanding Teleplay Award for the third time, with the
original version
of the pilot teleplay for
The Starlost,
“Phoenix Without Ashes.”

The
original
script, my words, my dream; not the emasculated and insipid drivel that was aired; but
my
work, as I wrote it, before the trolls fucked it over;
that
screenplay won the highest writers’ award Hollywood can give.

In the category of “best dramatic-episodic script,” meaning continuing series, as opposed to anthologies or comedies, there were eight nominees out of 400 top submissions: four segments of
The Waltons,
a
Gunsmoke,
a
Marcus Welby
and an episode of
Streets of San Francisco.
And my original teleplay … selected as the best for the year 1973.

It should be noted that unlike Emmys and Oscars, which are political in nature, are bought and sold and lobbied for with hundreds of thousands of dollars being spent in trade paper advertisements by studios and networks that realize the box-office value of such popularity prizes, the WGA awards are given
solely
on the basis of written material; in blind judging with the names of the authors removed, by three tiers of blue-ribbon readers (most of whom are previous winners) whose identities are kept strictly secret.

When I accepted the Award at the 26th Annual Awards Reception and Banquet in Hollywood, I said, in part, “If the fuckers want to rewrite you … smash them!”