Harlan Ellison's Watching

by Harlan Ellison

  Deponent sayeth: the fault lies in George Lucas. No one else had a hand in it. Not the hundreds of technicians, not the actors, not the unfortunate writer Bob Dolman, who was called in to complete the script, not even one of the names or companies we see on the extended credits. It was George Lucas who (as prerelease publicity told us) "studied myths from around the world before defining Willow to his satisfaction." It is the film Lucas wanted to make, based on the story Lucas dreamed up, exec-produced by Lucas, and directed in Lucas-fashion by his hand-picked choice, Ron Howard.

  And what are we presented with?

  The "saga" of Willow Ufgood is a ramekin of congealed porridge and curdled cream. There is far more of farina than fantasy in this wearisome, woebegone farrago of stolen set-pieces and New Age muddleheadedness. George Lucas has either taken utter leave of his senses, or the world of today has taken utter leave of George Lucas. For this is the kind of sloppy, inarticulate, inconsistent, unbelievable, fuzzyheaded crap that flower children read to one another in crash pads in Iowa. After half a century of C. S. Lewis, Mervyn Peake, Clifford Simak, Daniel Manus Pinkwater, Time Bandits, Madeleine L'Engle, Fritz Leiber and—though most prominently, scarcely my fave—J. R. R. Tolkien, for a rational adult even remotely au courant to believe this pile of unwashed hand-me-downs has any freshness, is a delusion at least on a par with those held by Ponce de Leon, Mary Baker Eddy, and Bishop James Ussher.

  Instead of Moses in the bullrushes, we have a cynical nod to NOW and a silly male's idea of feminism with the foundling converted to baby girl. Instead of Snow White's Queen Grimhilde, we have Queen Bavmorda, rasping, clenching, geshrying, and seeking the death of this child bearing "the sign" that a seer has vouchsafed marks the one who will overthrow the evil ruler. Instead of Han Solo, we have Val Kilmer as the cocky freebooter Madmartigan: liar, deceiver, cutpurse, self-server, but with a whore's heart of iron pyrite. Instead of Munchkins, we have Nelwyns. At least they don't have fuzzy feet. Instead of—

  But you catch my drift.

  Hand-me-downs. Flotsam and jetsam from a thousand ripoff Middle-Earth, Middle-Ages, Middle-Class fantasies. Cobbled together into one of those interminable "journey" templates where an unruly assortment of bizarre traveling companions dashes about like Michael Jackson fans in search of scalper's tickets. Weird beasties, much senseless swordplay, magic without logic introduced helterskelter when the "plot" begins to falter, noise and fireworks . . . and none of it able to pluck the heart-strings, much less appeal to the rational.

  All of it, despite its pomposity and bench-press sweatiness intended to convince us it's possible, nothing but impetus for the throwing of the Common Sense Switch. We watch it, we leave, and we forget it. Having wasted our time and our ticket money.

  George Lucas has wasted years, however.

  Following, as it does, on the heels of Lucas's last bold plunge into idiocy, Howard the Duck, we can only stare in utter confusion at such a suicidal effort. Has Lucas taken leave of his senses? Did he truly think there was anything in this mush to compel our love?

  Deponent suggests the Blight of Shirley MacLaine has caught up with the Executive Producer.

  In an upcoming essay it is my intention to go at considerable length to an examination of the Illiterate Audience. Not now. But part of the thesis is prefaced in the artifact called Willow. That element of the total theory dealing with the rampant spread of obscurantism that manifests itself in the foolish antics of pseudo-Christians at The Last Temptation of Christ, the resurgence of acceptance of spiritualism, now called "channeling," the goofy vogue for crystals, traveling to "focus locations" for Harmonic Convergences, the seeming lack of outrage that the Reagan Oligarchy regularly consulted and paid heed to a court astrologer (the last major world leader to have such a soothsayer on the payroll was Hitler, if you recall), and all the other sophomoric diddles the average citizen now considers part of the Rational Universe. Geraldo Rivera and Oprah and Morton Dunderhead, Jr. present . . .

  Road signs on the journey back into ignorance.

  And Willow, product of this New Age nonsense, tells a story that not even the shriven can tolerate. Dulled, confused, awash in their own inability to cope with a world filled with tax forms and interfacing and accessing and Star Wars Defense Systems, a world in which mediocre men seek to be President and giant corporations truly rule, a world in which blame can only be supported if it can be laid at the feet of Chance or God, even in such a world the faithful cannot accept such arrant nonsense.

  And the Common Sense Switch is thrown.

  We can only be thankful that we have been given Roger Rabbit. A film as mad as anything we've ever seen; a story as unlikely as any we've ever known; a dream and a delight that for all its unbelievable elements, is more down-to-earth and sensible than the "realistic" films we're told reflect Our Times.

  Deponent suggests we ponder for an instant, without anger and without raising our voices, in what a lowly state we exist, that the most rational icon given to us to adore, is an adaptation of Gary Wolf's bugfuck novel, in a cinematic ordering of what used to be considered absolute fantasy. Is something odd here, or did I wake up this morning in an alternate universe?

  Further, deponent sayeth not.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / January 1989

  INSTALLMENT 33:

  In Which The Canine Of Vacuity Is Wagged By The Far More Interesting Tale Of O'Bannon

  Quite a bit more than a few, but less than many, years ago, I attended the premiere of a major motion picture I had written. Well, yes, I'd written it, but it had been rewritten by both the director and the producer. Not very much to its benefit, as it turned out. Which is not to say that I, as a first-time scenarist, had written a screenplay that would have given Richard Brooks or Richard Breen even twinges of envy . . . but it had some sprightly moments, this screenplay as I'd written it; and it has a few lines that I can still hear without wincing (when, in moments of masochism, I pull out the videocassette for a crawl down Memory Slough). Every once in a while, no doubt fully aware of my anhedonia as regards this film, no doubt aware of my embarrassment at how badly the film turned out—though it made millions for the studio and production company—no doubt aware that it will cause me pain, some reincarnated dung-beetle now reborn as a fan, complete with rancid breath and overinflated opinion of his/her skills with the bon mot, oozes up to me in a public place and (usually loud enough to include total strangers) demands to know how I could have written such an awful film.

  Well, there are all sorts of explanations for a film having gone wrong, but in this case it was probably at least one-third my fault. It was terribly directed, extravagantly and expensively produced but with an impoverishment of taste or imagination; it was miscast hideously; and rewritten till every vestige of fun or originality had been removed from my original screenplay based on a not-very-good popular novel of the time. Which is not, I say again, to let me off the hook. It was my first film, and I thought I could do no wrong, and if I were to go back and re-read that scenario I'd certainly wince at the sophomorisms.

  (Which has nothing to do with the rudeness of the human chancre who throws it up in my face in much the same way, I'm sure, that smartasses prod Roger Ebert with his having worked on the raunchy 1970 Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, directed and co-scripted with Ebert by Russ Meyer. I've seen pod-brothers of the ambulatory phlegm who gig me for [the intentionally unnamed] cinematic abomination I wrote when I was in my early thirties, more than two decades ago, who have smarmily leered at Roger and oh-so-innocently inquired how such an erudite film critic and excellent journalist could have been part of "a project like that." And I've seen that tight, brave little smile Roger substitutes for the more appropriate, but less gentlemanly, left cross to the moron's jaw, and I identify with it, because I've used it myself. And I know just how Roger feels. I can recall with agonizing clarity the night I attended the world premiere of my filmic mea culpa, at a great old movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard, with searchlight
beams cutting wedges out of the sky above the City of the Angels, with live tv coverage and crowds being held back behind velvet ropes, and entering the theater having been kept from seeing even one frame of the produced film a priori by producers and studio fearful I'd piss on their parade by way of prerelease denunciation in Variety. As the film was run, and the audience roared ever more often and ever more derisively at what was not intended as a comedy, I shrank within my rented tuxedo and slipped lower and lower in my seat till I could barely see the screen. I withered, understanding that before my eyes I was witnessing the ritual slaughter of my budding career as a writer of theatrical motion pictures. I was dead on, of course. There is a moment near the outset of one's career in Hollywood, when the Big Break manifests itself. Taken at the flood, that moment can stretch and carry one into a word-of-mouth security that can withstand an occasional flop. But if the moment goes sour, for whatever reasons, one can continue working, making a decent living, but there is a taint that thereafter attaches to all who are identified with the plague-bearing item. And that stigma became the word-of-mouth that lobbied against my getting other big-budget, serious writing assignments for the large screen. It's been a long time since it all happened, and though I suffer a frisson of sadness for What Might Have Been, like Roger Ebert I've put it behind me, and work as skillfully as I can on the projects that do come my way. But I remember. And I suppose it is logged in my life as one of the few episodes on the list of If I Could Do It Over . . . )

  So I know, to the core I know, how my friend Rockne O'Bannon feels when he tells me he has not seen, and will not accompany me and Susan to see, a screening of his first feature film, Alien Nation (20th Century Fox). I know how he feels, and I hear him explain how the producer, Gale Anne Hurd, she who was allied with, married to, separated from, director James Cameron, altered his vision. I hear him, and I sympathize, because the litany is not only one I've shrilled endlessly, but which bears within itself the echoes of artistic pain from thousands of screenwriters who came before us. He cannot bear to sit watching what became of his work, as I was forced to sit that long-ago night on Hollywood Boulevard, writhing before the projected images of corrupted invention.

  Let me tell you a little about Rock O'Bannon. Not only because he is a pal of mine, or because we worked together on the 1985–86 revival of The Twilight Zone television series for CBS (though that is a secret agenda I would be less than forthright to conceal), but because I tell you what I truly and deeply believe: Rock O'Bannon is a writer of uncommon talent, vast promise, and urgently in need of a kick in the ass from one he knows likes and admires him. But more important, he is emblematic of the kind of men and women who are, more and more overwhelmingly, coming to be the model of young people writing films these days in a medium schizophrenic to the point of hysteria.

  Here is what the studio press packet on Alien Nation says of Rock:

  Born in Los Angeles, Rockne S. O'Bannon was raised in the film industry; his father was a gaffer and his mother a contract dancer at MGM. While most ten-year-olds were reading The Hardy Boys and comic books, he was reading screenplays smuggled home by his father. He learned the business by working in the mailroom and leading guided tours at a major studio. He went on to work as a production assistant on Lorimar's television productions The Waltons and Apple's Way.

  From age eight O'Bannon knew he wanted to be a writer. His first stab at screenwriting was developing a script for what he thought was a natural spin-off of his then favorite television series The Man from U.N.C.L.E. entitled "Boy from U.N.C.L.E." O'Bannon continued writing screenplays through high school and upon graduation took six months off to concentrate seriously on his writing. That's when he moved from mailroom to production assistant at Lorimar.

  After leaving Lorimar, he returned to college to continue his English studies, but in a short time dropped out when he got a job at MGM. He stayed there several years working in the publicity department and the story department, simultaneously writing the studio's company newspaper.

  Having an office to himself afforded O'Bannon the means to continue writing scripts while working at his job. After he had written several scripts on spec, his agent submitted a script for the recently revived Twilight Zone television series. The producers were so impressed with his "Wordplay" episode that they hired him to write more scripts and to serve as the story editor for the first season. He went on to work as a consultant during the second season. During the hiatus, he wrote the "Life on Death Row" episode of Steven Spielberg's anthology series, Amazing Stories.

  It was during this period that O'Bannon met Alien Nation's co-producer, Richard Kobritz, and told him of his story idea for the film, formerly titled Outer Heat. They have since formed a partnership and are developing a project which O'Bannon plans to direct with Kobritz serving as the producer.

  When the producers of The Twilight Zone were trying to inveigle me into returning to television after ten years of voluntary abstinence from that most beguiling and lucrative of addictions, they sent me a small stack of scripts that had been accepted by CBS as correct for the re-thunk, contemporary version of that classic series. Several of them were knockouts, several of them were acceptable, several of them were stinkers, and one of them blew me into orbit.

  It was Rock's eighteen-page, airtime-seventeen-minute story, "Wordplay." It was a marvel. Nothing less than a marvel.

  If you missed it, you missed one of the classic moments of fantasy on television, and a tale of imagination that is, in my view, on a par with the very best that has ever been done in the genre of the fantastic:

  A perfectly average guy wakes one odd day to find that everyone is speaking a different language. Well, not exactly. It's still English, but the words have different meanings, different uses. A brash, young guy who works in the protagonist's company approaches him for advice. He says: "Hey, Mr. Thompson. You know that new girl in accounting? Barbie? I've been asking her out and finally, today, she says okay—but she's gonna be here in five minutes and I can't think of anyplace to take her for dinosaur. I mean, I thought of the Capitol Inn, but then that might look like I'm trying too hard. What d'you think?"

  Thompson looks at him and laughs. He replies, "You're planning to take this young woman out for dinosaur, huh?"

  And when the kid repeats it, confused at Thompson's wry response, Thompson thinks he's putting him on. The kid gets huffy. "Look, Mr. Thompson, if you don't want to, uh, or can't think of anyplace, I'll just ask somebody else."

  It gets worse and worse. More and more words gibber and dance out of Thompson's reach. Dinosaur, for lunch. Peaches, for rain. Segregate, for clear. On and on, till people are calling him Hinge instead of Bill, and his wife, trying to tell him that their child is dying and they must get him to a hospital, shrieks, "Dark outer! Kettle rod that thought collins around! Moon tight! Moon tight!"

  In seventeen minutes, Rock O'Bannon creates, complicates and solves an apocryphal human dilemma that, in terms of modern fable, encapsulates the terror and helplessness of modern man's inability to orient himself in a bewildering technocratic society.

  It is, in my view, simply brilliant, by every standard of fine writing we accept as necessary for the creation of true literature, true Art. He was twenty-eight years old when he wrote it.

  I took the job on TZ, in large part, because the producers had been smart enough to snap up that script from the slush pile. If they could spot top-level writing like that, then there was hope for the series, and I might yet find myself working among artists, not sausage-merchants.

  Working with Rock O'Bannon was a delight. I never thought of him as a tyro, as a youngster breaking in. He was a peer. And so he remains today.

  But Alien Nation, his debut as a feature film writer, is a woeful, empty thing. He was thirty-two when he wrote it, last year. I'll get back to Rock, and that kick in the ass, in a moment; but first, let me review Alien Nation for you, so you won't waste your money seeing it.

  Los Angeles. Near future. Three hun
dred thousand aliens, bred to be workers, slaves, beanfield hands from outer space, arrive on Earth. They look a lot like us, but are grotty enough to be considered the new "niggers." They are shunted into a ghetto, and because they have been bred to adapt almost totally to whatever environment becomes their lot, they are soon just like all of us—shopkeepers, cops, hookers, fast-food clerks, mechanics, street thugs. Suddenly, there is a murder of a human by a "slag" (the epithet for "newcomer"). Unthinkable. So a human cop, played by James Caan, is linked with the first "newcomer" to make the grade of detective on the LAPD, Mandy Patinkin as Sam Francisco. Together they set out to solve the baffling murder, mysteriously linked to the slaying of two "newcomers."

  Baffling, as in Oh, did I nod off, dear? Did I miss anything? Mysterious, as in I've got to take a leak; tell me what I missed. Want me to pick up some popcorn while I'm out there?

  And for the next ninety-four minutes of running time, we have the cinematic equivalent of Gerald Ford's presidency. Nothing of consequence happens.

  Here is a sixteen—seventeen million dollar film that functions as a perfect soporific. It isn't even bad enough to be a howler, bad enough to spark vituperation, bad enough to become a cult favorite for those who dote on turkeys. It is just lugubrious. Somnolent. Derivative. Empty. Yes, that's just what it is: empty calories. Not even interesting junk food. No spice, no jump, not even stupid enough to provide uncooked meat for the disputatious critic to amuse his basest instincts. It is, in the vernacular of my people, a lox. It doth but lie there and rot from the head down.