Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  And she never did.

  The day I showed up to start my job at Filmation I was introduced to staff writer Larry DiTillio, who occupied the office directly across from my own. In his mid-forties, Larry was an expat New Yorker of Italian descent with close-cropped, tight black hair, an affinity for loud Hawaiian shirts, and a fierce sense of humor. While watching He-Man I’d felt the presence of someone who knew how to design worlds, and I soon learned that Larry was responsible for much of that mythos; it was his intelligence I had detected.

  I got right to work so we didn’t speak much until that Friday, when I poked my head into his office to say that I was relieved to have gotten this far. “To be honest, I wasn’t sure I could do this job.”

  “That’s okay,” he said. “I didn’t think you could do it either.”

  With that we became friends and competitors, each determined to turn in more scripts than the other. Every week was a shoot-out to see who would come in first with a finished draft. When he suggested a race to see who could write a script in the least time from a dead start, I barely beat him, coming in at eight hours to his twelve. To enliven the work and screw with the writing process on the other side of the hall, we would sometimes declare war on each other. One afternoon when he was out of the office for lunch, I stole the platen* from his electric typewriter and hid it, leaving the paper in place so it would take him a moment to figure out what I’d done.

  Shortly afterward I heard him return to his office and sit at his desk. The squeak of his chair was followed by the tap-tap-tap of his typewriter. Silence. Another squeak. Then Larry appeared in my doorway, surrounded by a plume of pipe smoke. “I want my platen back.”

  “I know not this platen of which you speak, sir,” I said, not looking up from my work.

  He pulled out a cigarette lighter and nodded to the cartoons I’d taped to my office door. “Give me my platen back or I’ll burn down your office.”

  “You wouldn’t dare,” said I.

  He clicked on the lighter and ignited the bottom cartoon. Flames began making their way up the door. I counted to ten to see how far he was prepared to take this. He didn’t move.

  “Fair enough,” I said and handed back his platen. He put out the blaze, turned, and left.

  Moments later, Arthur passed my office on his way back from a meeting, then stopped. Backed up. Looked at the charred remains of the cartoons. “What happened here?”

  I shrugged. “Larry tried to burn down my office.”

  “Oh,” he said and continued on his way. That’s just kind of how it was between me and Larry.

  Working at Filmation led to representation by Candace (Candy) Monteiro and Fredda Rose, who ran a boutique agency that represented most of the animation writers in town because other agencies didn’t think it was worth their time. When Arthur asked me to work with the remaining freelance writers, most of whom were their clients, I found myself giving notes to the same people who had been less than helpful in my early attempts to sell an animation script. Many of them had been hoping to land the last available staff gig at Filmation, and seemed rather annoyed that I was on the other side of the desk.

  Working with outside writers was the kind of work normally done by story editors, who received on-screen credit as such, not by staff writers, but at that moment I didn’t really care. I was just happy to have my very first full-time job in television.

  During the five years Kathryn and I had been living together, we’d rarely discussed the idea of getting married because we were always just scraping by. Now that we had achieved some measure of stability there was a growing expectation among both our families that we would get married.

  For years I’d hoped that I would grow out of the emotional distance that stood between me and a healthy, normal relationship; that one day I’d awaken free of past traumas, capable of openly expressing love and affection. But that day never came. If anything, the older I got, the more distant those emotions became. There is a French proverb: In love there are two kinds: those who kiss, and those who offer the cheek. With each passing year I was being buried alive beneath the ass-end of that equation, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I wasn’t husband material by any stretch of the imagination, but Kathryn was my best friend; I was deeply grateful for her unwavering support and profoundly guilty that she had endured so much difficulty during the time we’d been together. Getting married would allow me to show my appreciation for all she’d done, honoring her sacrifices and our friendship.

  Only with decades of hindsight is it clear that those were exactly the wrong reasons to get married. That decision also led to a particularly weird conversation with my father shortly before the ceremony.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” he asked.

  “I think so . . . she’s a terrific person.”

  “I’m not asking about her, she’s fine. The question is, do you really want to inflict you on her?”

  It was probably the only fair question he’d ever asked.

  Despite having opposed my writing career at every step, my father saw my job in TV as entirely his doing, and he demanded we gather for dinner every Thanksgiving in San Diego so he could show off. He liked to tell everyone that without him standing behind me, pushing me to succeed, I would’ve ended up “a bum.” By contrast, the years I’d struggled and failed were entirely my fault, he had nothing to do with it. Kathryn and I dreaded those dinners, during which my father would get louder, drunker, and more insufferable.

  Finally, my patience at an end, I said that I would only come down for the next Thanksgiving if there was no drinking. “If it happens again,” I said, “there will be consequences.”

  To my surprise he agreed, and when we arrived that Thursday there was no evidence of alcohol in sight. For a brief moment I thought he might actually keep his promise. But as the evening wore on he became noticeably drunk. When he went to the bathroom, I checked the cup of coffee he’d been nursing. It reeked of booze slipped in during his visits to the kitchen. At dinner his eyes glittered darkly, confident that he’d pulled a fast one on me.

  During the long drive back to Los Angeles, I finally came to terms with the fact that my family was more than just dysfunctional, it was destructive. My mother, sisters, and I had always been strangers to one another, kept together by threats rather than affection, and my father was never going to change because he saw no reason to change. If there was a problem, it was always someone else’s fault. There was no joy in my family; our every contact was forced, awkward, and dissatisfying. There was nothing good to be salvaged.

  My father ignored my warning because he believed there was nothing I could do to him.

  He was wrong.

  For the first eighteen years of my life he had subjected me to the worst kinds of physical, psychological, and emotional torture. I could debate endlessly his reasons for doing those things, or try to figure out why his personality had splintered to the point where he needed to inflict pain on others to feel alive, but that didn’t alter the fact that those were his problems, his choices. Like all abusers he wanted me to believe I had no choice but to accept this behavior, that I could never escape him. That had been true when I was younger, but I was now old enough to walk away from an abusive situation; if I failed to do so, then it became my problem, my choice. I had no control over my father’s behavior, but I had absolute control over my proximity. He could only hurt me while I chose to remain within range of the fist and the boot, the lie and the scream. If I wanted to stop the abuse, all I had to do was step outside his reach.

  Superman may have been the most patient person on the planet, but when faced with someone he couldn’t kill because of his moral code—but who was too dangerous to be allowed to roam free—sooner or later even he gave up and exiled that individual to the Phantom Zone.

  I’d given my family thirty years of my life. I would not surrender a minute more.

  “Let me be really clear,” I said when I called the
next day. “You will never see or hear from me again. There will be no visits, no phone calls, no letters . . . I’m cutting off all contact, permanently.”

  Was I running away from the problem? Probably. But when you’re in a situation where nothing will change, running away isn’t just a solution, it’s the only solution. No one being chased by a bobcat thinks, Maybe I should stick it out, try to make the relationship work.

  And there are some people in this world who are just frickin’ bobcats.

  For this to succeed it would have to be a complete break with everyone in my immediate family. I’d waited years for my sisters to get out from under my father’s thumb, but Theresa stayed because she thought she was helping my mother, little understanding Evelyn’s role in the dysfunctional nightmare that was our family, and Lorraine was induced to stay by Charles’s vague promises of financial reward (none of which were kept). If I stayed in contact with my sisters, he would use them to try and drag me back into the snake pit of our family’s psychodramas. A clean break would protect them.*

  He’ll crawl back, my father said.

  He was wrong. From Thanksgiving 1984 to my father’s death on January 28, 2011, I never saw or spoke to my parents again, not in person, and not over the phone. For months after breaking away, the twelve-year-old boy in me was afraid he would show up and beat me. But that day never came. I began to feel as though I had awakened from the nightmare of a lifetime, and stopped dreading the approach of the holidays, or the ringing phone.

  For the first time in a long, long, very long time, I could breathe.

  That winter I turned my attention back to the Christine Collins pages I’d copied from the City Council transcript. The more I read the more curious I became. Why had her child been kidnapped, and what happened to him? How did the police manage to bring back the wrong boy, and why would they incarcerate then institutionalize her to avoid admitting their error? I would need to do a lot more research before I could figure out the story, but there were no secondary sources (contemporary articles, novels, or nonfiction books) that covered the events. So I began digging into primary sources: original documents, letters, files, and microfiche copies of articles at the Los Angeles Public Library, City Hall, and the Los Angeles County Courthouse. The process was agonizingly slow. Many of the files dating back to 1928 weren’t well indexed, so I spent my weekends sifting through mountains of white-on-black photocopies of court records and newspapers for any mention of the case during its earliest stages. It was only later, after news got out that Christine’s son was one of several boys kidnapped and presumably killed at a ranch in Riverside, that lurid headlines describing the case splashed across the front page of every major newspaper in Southern California.

  The more I dug, the more I realized that I didn’t have the tools as a writer to wrestle this beast to the ground. Every time I thought I had it figured out, the story would twist off in another direction. It was like trying to break a horse without reins or a saddle, and always ended up with me face-down in the dirt. So I decided to stop trying to tell the story and just organize the facts into a timeline, hoping that once I could see the whole thing at a glance I’d know where to go with it.

  He-Man and the Masters of the Universe generated hundreds of millions of dollars for Mattel and attracted legions of fans, but it also drew the ire of media watchdogs and parents’ groups. Church sermons decried the show as “pro-Satan” and offered workshops to help parents protect their children from the evil that permeated every frame. Child psychologists and pressure groups like Peggy Charon’s Action for Children’s Television pushed the fiction that the show was filled with violence, using numbers that were skewed by designating incidents as trivial as a slammed door as an act of violence.

  Despite this backlash, Filmation decided to launch a companion series, and since Larry DiTillio and I were world-builders fascinated by mythology, we were chosen to develop She-Ra: Princess of Power, breaking out the characters, rules of engagement, and history of this fictional world. The downside was that we would not get credit for creating the show or receive residuals on the series or the sale of any toys based on our creations.

  We bristled further when we learned that we’d be working under new creative restraints. To soften the ire of the pressure groups that were hammering He-Man, Filmation enlisted consultants to ensure that our female lead was appropriately maternal, nurturing, and nonthreatening to male authority figures. They also decided that while the male characters on the show could use swords or arrows or punch the bad guys, our female lead was not free to do the same. So even though she owned a massive sword, she wasn’t allowed to actually hurt anyone with it. Instead she would spin like a ballerina and—almost by accident—kick someone out of frame and hope the audience would fail to ask why the bad guy didn’t just walk back into frame and beat the crap out of her.

  This took much of the fun out of developing She-Ra, but Larry and I kept pushing forward because we liked the world we were creating. After finishing the series bible and the arc for the first sixty-five-episode season, we began writing our own scripts and meeting with freelancers.

  One of the hardest parts of launching a new TV series is making sure that the outside writers share the same vision for the show that you do. But many of the writers who had no problem writing for He-Man or other male-dominated shows hit a wall when writing for a female action lead. Some made her soft, passive, or little-girl feminine, while others wrote her as He-Man with breasts. When we reached a point where we were spending more time editing the freelancers than writing our own scripts, we met with Arthur and studio head Lou Scheimer to ask for credit as story editors. We weren’t even looking for more money, just to have the work acknowledged. We thought our position fairly reasonable: give us credit for what we’re doing, or we’ll just do the work we were being given credit for, writing our own scripts as staff writers.

  They were outraged. Filmation didn’t allow story editor credits or give their writers created-by credit. As far as the outside world was concerned, Lou was the only creative force guiding Filmation, and he was determined to keep it that way.

  After returning to the writers’ wing stunned and dispirited, I convinced Larry that we should keep trying to change their minds, but if we didn’t get what we wanted by that Friday, we should resign. We were the heart of the She-Ra development process; finding someone new at this late date would be expensive and time-consuming. Surely they’d see the sense of that.

  The Friday deadline passed.

  I walked across the hall into Larry’s office. “We have to go,” I said.

  He didn’t want to leave. Neither did I. Nine months earlier I’d been teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe, and now I was going to quit the best job I’d ever had? Worse still, most of the other animated series in town were already staffed and there were no new shows on the horizon. If we quit, we might be out of work for a long time. The logical part of my brain said resigning was the height of foolishness. But the rest of my brain is incapable of backing down from a fight.

  “We have to do this,” I said, “and we have to do it right now.”

  Larry chewed on his pipe for a moment, then nodded. “Okay,” he said, “but I want you to remember that I’m Italian. If I don’t work again because of this, I’m going to hunt you down and kill you.”

  “Fair deal,” I said.

  Despite the battle that ended our tenure on He-Man and She-Ra, the shows took root in popular culture beyond anything we could have anticipated, spawning thirty years of comic books, conventions, cosplay, toys, a He-Man feature film in 1987, sequel animated series in 1990 and 2002, and, as I write this, a new version of She-Ra on Netflix. DVDs of the series became bestsellers, and featured interviews with me and Larry, as well as digital copies of our original scripts, notes, and the She-Ra series bible. Young women saw She-Ra as a role model, a female action hero at a time when there were very few of those. Their response validated our struggle to maintain her warrior edge a
gainst those who wanted to soften her into a mommy figure.

  But we foresaw none of this as we walked out of Filmation. We knew only that we were out of a job, and that if things didn’t work out, Larry would put out a contract on my life.

  It took a while, but our agents found jobs for us at DIC Entertainment in Studio City on an animated series entitled Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors. It was another dumb title in a string of shows whose titles were based on the He-Man model of NAME OF HERO + OTHERS: He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, She-Ra: Princess of Power, Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, Captain Planet and the Planeteers, Captain Harlock and the Queen of a Thousand Years, and Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends. We wouldn’t be on a weekly salary, but our per-script fees were decent and we were guaranteed enough assignments to make up the difference in what we’d lost by leaving Filmation.

  The show’s premise was patently ridiculous: sentient monster plants capable of turning into vehicles would drive from planet to planet on massive vines that could literally stretch trillions of miles and create highways between planets orbiting in different directions in totally different solar systems where they would wreak havoc for no clearly defined reason.* The science was nonsensical to anyone with a third-grade education, and the characters were derivative in the extreme: a young hero (à la Prince Adam in He-Man, or Luke Skywalker in Star Wars), a wise mentor (à la the Sorceress in He-Man or Obi-Wan), a reckless pilot (about as à la Han Solo as they could get without receiving fire from Lucasfilm’s attorneys), and a suit of armor inhabited by an invisible but constantly nervous companion (à la Orko or R2D2).

  Since nothing about the show made sense, story editors Haskell Barkin and Jim Carlson had a hard time infusing their writers with any sense of passion. Many of them just ignored the illogic, wrote for the paycheck, and moved on. But coming from a love of world-building, Larry and I were incapable of writing scripts where things happen just because they happen. There had to be some kind of rationale. So we fought incessantly against the series’ various dumbnesses, making life hell for Haskell and Jim, who just wanted to get this over with so they could move on to something more rewarding. Why were we hammering them with questions about physics in a show about giant killer interstellar plants with a fetish for all-wheel drives, for chrissakes? What the hell was wrong with us?