Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  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

  INSTALLMENT 22:

  In Which The Land Echoes To The Sound Of An Ox Of A Different Color Being Gored

  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 vot
e 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!

  (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 on
e 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.