Becoming Superman

by J. Michael Straczynski

  Since the show required a lot of world-building, I again brought in Larry DiTillio, who after me would become the series’ primary writer. Besides, I wasn’t quite sure when the vendetta he’d mentioned upon leaving He-Man might expire.

  Like all dramatic television at the time, science fiction shows were episodic in structure. Story threads set up in one episode had to be paid off in the same episode, pushing the reset button at fade out so the next episode could start clean with nothing left unresolved. Long-form storytelling simply wasn’t done because the networks and studios didn’t think audiences were capable of following a plot line that went longer than the occasional two-parter.

  Being rather contrarian, I wanted to try something different: a season-long story that would build on events in prior episodes and foreshadow incidents that would play out much later. To further subvert audience expectations, the season finale would turn the premise of the series upside down by destroying the characters’ base of operations, transforming a show about a group of heroes operating out of a safe haven into a series about insurrectionists on the run, hunted and alone. I could never have gotten that idea past any network, but we were making the show for syndication, without a network riding herd on us, for a toy company that wasn’t quite sure what to do with us. It was the rough beginning of a new approach to episodic storytelling that would profoundly alter the television landscape, but I didn’t know that at the time.

  I just thought it would be really cool.

  As I began working on Captain Power, DC Comics editor Bob Greenberger invited me to write an issue of Teen Titans Spotlight. I agreed immediately, excited to come full circle with comics from fan to writer. Besides, the form was new to me and would push me out of my comfort zone.

  Spotlight featured solo tales of the group’s members, so I set Cyborg against Harvey Dent, a character from Batman’s rogues’ gallery better known as Two-Face. Both men were alike in that they were physically scarred and kept their faces partially covered, but one became a hero, the other a killer. Dent believes that the circumstances of his injury left him no other choice than to become a killer, and that Cyborg would have turned out the same under similar conditions. To test this theory, Dent puts him through a series of horrific events, confident that they will push him to the dark side.

  I wanted to make Cyborg’s refusal to return evil with evil a reflection of what I went through with my family. Like Dent, my father blamed outside circumstances for what he became, whereas I leaned into the idea that we can choose another path. Every time Dent or my father said “I have no choice,” they’d made a choice, they just didn’t want to admit it.

  Inch by inch I was working more of my personal history into the writing, a process I found both liberating and terrifying.

  I was dead asleep when the phone rang at nine A.M. on a Saturday morning. Everybody knows I’m a night writer and to never call before noon, so I figured it was important.

  I fumbled for the phone and figured out which part went to my ear. “Yeahwhuddisit?”

  I recognized the voice instantly as Harlan Ellison. “I’ve had it with those fuckers at KPFK,” he said and let fly with a string of profanities whose fury was matched only by their flawless construction. In keeping with Mike Hodel’s last wishes, Harlan had been hosting Hour 25 for over a year, only to be worn down by repeated tugs-of-war with the station over content and Politburo-style power struggles over who was in charge of what. The flashpoint was a heated argument over whether or not he would be allowed to read one of his short stories over the air, a piece that contained language permissible in previous years but which was now considered problematic by station personnel. Fed up, Harlan quit the show.

  “I want you to take over as host of Hour 25,” he said.

  “What about the guys at the station? Don’t they get a vote in who takes over?”

  “No, fuck ’em” he said. “Mike gave it to me, I own it, I copyrighted the show in the name of my company, and now I give it to you. You know the genre, the people, you used to be a reporter, you’ve done radio . . . you’re the best guy for the job. Do you want it or not?”

  “Yeah . . . yeah, I’ll take it,” I said.

  “Good luck,” Harlan said, and hung up.

  Two cups of coffee later I was sufficiently awake to understand what I’d just agreed to. Hosting a two-hour weekly talk show meant more than just doing the interviews; there would have to be extensive prep work—reading books by guest authors, researching the latest doings in SF, finding and booking guests—all while working ridiculously long hours on Captain Power.

  And then there was the fear factor. I was not that far from the student who couldn’t finish reading a story out loud in Mrs. Chater’s class and threw up every morning out of sheer terror at speaking to an audience of thirty SDSU freshmen. I’d done brief, ten-minute review segments for KSDO, but hosting Hour 25 would mean being live on the radio for two hours every Friday night, speaking to thousands of listeners. The very idea filled me with dread.

  I picked up the phone to call Harlan back and decline the offer, then put it back down. Yes, the idea scared the bejeezus out of me, but wasn’t that the very reason why I should do it, why I had to do it? Taking chances was why I’d come to Los Angeles in the first place. Besides, doing the show would let me talk to some of the brightest minds in science fiction, fantasy, and horror, conversations that would be invaluable to my development as a writer.

  I could do this. I would do this.

  Six days later, Friday, June 26, 1987, I throttled back my terror and showed up to host my first installment of Hour 25, with Larry DiTillio along as cohost because his sense of humor was a good complement to my own occasional stodginess. During our interview with Star Trek actor Walter Koenig, my fear of screwing up kicked my voice a full octave higher than normal, but I got through it and stayed with the show for five years. No, it didn’t pay anything—listener-supported Pacifica stations were staffed almost entirely by volunteers—but over the course of 260 broadcasts we interviewed such luminaries as William Gibson, Ray Bradbury, Neil Gaiman, Dean Koontz, John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Robert Bloch, Vonda McIntyre, and Norman Spinrad. Every Friday night was a master class in writing with some of the best in the business.

  Since KPFK didn’t have the resources to provide aircheck copies of our broadcasts, I used a video recorder wired to a radio to record them, hoping to one day publish the interviews in book form. I didn’t know that the recording head was damaged, so the audio could only be played back on that same VCR. After it died, only a few recordings made before the heads blew out could be rescued. Five years of work, over five hundred hours of history, just gone.

  You’ve got a mean sense of humor, Mike Hodel.

  Captain Power debuted September 20, 1987, as the number-one-rated kids show in the United States—my third show to earn that distinction—and became a favorite of legions of science fiction fans. Even critic Roger Ebert praised it.

  So of course it was immediately dogpiled by media advocacy groups for “excessive violence.” There were newspaper editorials against the show, televised tub-thumpings, tarring, feathering, and dead-catting. Even activist Jerry Rubin rode the tidal wave of protest, writing in the Los Angeles Times that Captain Power “exposed thousands of children to the myth that violence can solve our differences.”*

  The press uncritically repeated claims that the show subjected viewers to 130 acts of violence per episode, which was patently ridiculous. One hundred thirty acts of violence in twenty-two minutes of airtime would require five violent acts every minute, which was inconceivable and far beyond our budget. A little digging revealed that if there was a firefight during an episode, the critics counted every bullet fired as a violent incident rather than labeling it as one fight. Some even categorized harsh words or insults as acts of violence. It’s easy to start racking up numbers when you fudge the data so violence means whatever you want it to mean.

  But the criticisms made Mattel nervous, and the
y began pumping out notes to minimize the violence. After getting a note that we could no longer shoot robots in the head, I emailed producer John Copeland to ask, “Is there any stricture against kicking them in the nuts?”

  In August 1987, after finishing work on the first season of Captain Power, Kathryn and I visited Brighton, England, to promote the show at the 45th World Science Fiction Convention, with a side trip to London. In the three years since selling my first He-Man episode, I’d written sixty-six produced scripts, along with dozens of outlines and premises for outside writers, story-edited over 150 freelance scripts, and had taken on a weekly two-hour radio talk show.

  I was beyond exhausted.

  “You’re not going to do any writing on this vacation, okay?” Kathryn said. “You’re going to leave the work behind and just enjoy yourself.”

  By now I was used to writing ten to twenty pages per day, every day; without a place to put that energy, I was like a border collie desperate for something to do. Within a few days of arriving in England I was vibrating so badly that I bought a pocket-size notebook and began slipping into the bathroom at night while Kathryn was asleep to outline Demon Night, my first attempt at a horror novel. By the time we returned to Los Angeles I’d secretly written vast tracts of the book and was able to finish the whole thing over the next month. I’d tackled the book as a writing exercise, to see if I could pull off a story at that length, so I didn’t give much thought to selling it; I just put the manuscript away and forgot about it. Captain Power was about to gear up for a second season and that would keep me plenty busy for a while. The ratings were solid, the reviews were good, the producers were happy, everything was perfect.

  Honestly, by now you’d think I’d see it coming, wouldn’t you?

  A few days after I was nominated for a Gemini Award, Canada’s version of an Emmy, for Best Writing in a Dramatic Series for my work on Captain Power, a meeting was convened with Gary Goddard, Doug Netter, and John Copeland to discuss the renewal. They explained that Mattel insisted on having approval over all scripts as a condition of renewing the series. I said I couldn’t work in a situation where a toy company had creative control, and suggested they hire DiTillio as my replacement. Larry was a gentler, more collaborative soul and knew the Captain Power universe better than anyone else. Overall, it was a very amicable conversation: I knew this wasn’t their fault, and they respected my position.

  On the other hand:

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” my agent asked when I told her the news. Her tone left no doubt that she wanted to put my head between two red-hot iron tongs for an extended period. “First She-Ra, then Ghostbusters, now this? You can’t keep walking off shows. You’re going to get a reputation for being difficult. What am I talking about, you’ve already got that reputation. Still, it’s your decision. If you really believe you have to go, then go, just don’t be surprised when no one calls to hire you after this.”

  She was right. I was almost certainly unemployable by now.

  If you hold fast to what’s true and right and just, things work out, I reminded myself. Remember, you only got Captain Power because you left Ghostbusters.

  Candy called back a few days later. “Mark Shelmerdine, who runs London Films, wants to talk to you about coming on as story editor for a show he’s producing,” she said, disbelief in her voice. “How the hell do you keep doing this? How do you keep blowing up your career only to end up on something better within a week? I just don’t understand it.”

  I allowed that it was a mystery to me as well. “So what’s the show?” I assumed it was going to be an animated series, or another toy-sponsored show.

  She let out a long, slow breath, anticipating my reaction, and I heard a smile come into her voice.

  “It’s season three of The Twilight Zone.”

  Chapter 23

  Into the Zone

  MGM had made a significant investment in The Twilight Zone during its network run, but ended up short of the one hundred episodes needed to be viable in syndication. Desperate to recoup their investment, they commissioned another thirty half-hour episodes to be produced by Mark Shelmerdine.

  Mark shared my belief that the Zone functioned best when there was a sense of morality at the center of the stories, and that this had been missing from many of the network episodes. I’d only written one produced script, but as Mark scanned through the episodes he could see that I was trying to hew to that tradition. I took great pleasure in knowing that the very aspect that Phil DeGuere had worked so hard to kill in my script was exactly what led Mark to hire me as executive story editor.

  To balance out the more fantastical elements of The Twilight Zone, Mark wanted a show grounded in emotional truth, that would explore our own dreams, nightmares, hopes, and fears. This was exciting but scary; I was still getting used to the idea of exposing my personal feelings in my stories. Doing what he described would require confronting parts of my life that I’d worked hard to ignore.

  Find what you’re afraid of, and do it.

  Having always felt emotionally cut off from the rest of the world, I wrote “Dream Me a Life” (with Eddie Albert) about a reclusive widower in a retirement home who begins sharing the dreams of a catatonic woman down the hall. Alone, neither of them can overcome the loss of those they loved, but together they find the strength to face the world anew. “Rendezvous in a Dark Place” was based on my grandmother’s obsession with death and her tendency to attend the funerals of people she didn’t know. Refusing to engage with a world she feels has passed her by, our protagonist falls into a dangerous romance with Death personified. The episode starred Janet Leigh (known for her work in Psycho) as a surrogate for my grandmother, who was not available for the role on account of being actually dead.

  From the “where do you get your ideas?” department: One evening after taking Kathryn and her parents to dinner, the waiter came running after me because I’d forgotten to sign the credit card slip. Embarrassed by the gaffe, I explained that I’d pawned my memory that morning and it was now full of holes. Wait a second, I thought, I can make a story out of that. The result was “The Mind of Simon Foster” (starring Bruce Weitz), about a pawnshop that buys people’s memories of high school graduations, first kisses, and other deeply personal moments that are then sold to collectors.

  The hardest episode to write concerned domestic violence. “Acts of Terror” starred Melanie Mayron as a battered wife who gets a porcelain Doberman that becomes her guardian, the literal manifestation of her rage at years of abuse. Born of my desire to see my father get back a little of the pain he dealt out, I was pleased and honored to learn later that several battered women’s groups used the episode to help them face their rage.

  I’d always heard the term “writing as therapy” but never applied it to myself until The Twilight Zone. There was a lot about my life that I couldn’t talk about openly, but putting those events into the lives of fictional characters made it easier. I could be more objective while at the same time investing the characters with the emotions I couldn’t allow for myself, a process that diminished some of the weight I’d been carrying for years. I felt lighter. I hadn’t expected that.

  One afternoon, Mark asked if I’d be willing to write a script based on someone else’s outline. I hesitated. I’d come onto the Zone to tell my own stories, not someone else’s. While I sometimes developed stories that were then assigned to freelancers, the river had never flowed the other way. But Mark was a great guy so I said yes, eager to be of service.

  “So what’ve you got?” I asked.

  He plopped a sheaf of papers on my desk.

  The outline was entitled “Our Selena Is Dying.”

  The writer was Rod Serling.

  “Carol Serling, Rod’s widow, found this in his files,” Mark said. “It’s an outline for a Twilight Zone episode he never got around to writing in teleplay form. Would you like to write the script in a posthumous collaboration with Mr. Serling?”

  And for th
e barest flicker of a moment I was back at Southwestern College, in my senior year of high school, looking at a familiar figure in a corduroy jacket. Cut every third adjective. And never let them stop you from telling the story you want to tell.

  Yes, sir, I’ll do my best.

  How unlikely was it that I would grow up on Serling’s words, meet him without realizing it, then sixteen years later find myself on staff of The Twilight Zone, collaborating with him after the fact on one of his scripts? Improbable. No: impossible. But there it was.

  The story—about an elderly woman who invites her young cousin to stay with her in an attempt to draw off her youth and thus avoid death—would not have fallen into Serling’s major arcana, like “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street” or “Walking Distance.” But even his minor works were good enough to make me want to get out of the writing business before someone figured out I was a fraud.

  Giving the script the correct flavor meant trying to approximate Serling’s writing style, which is so distinct that it’s easy to spin out into unintended parody, as evidenced by any comedian who’s ever said to an audience, “Submitted for your approval.” But ignoring the music in his style would produce something that was tone-deaf and inelegant. I thought back to the first day I began to write, when I finally understood the difference between a writer’s style and his voice. Comedians could mock Serling’s style because it was the most obvious part of his work; but his voice, the clockwork precision of the mind behind that trademark style, was far more difficult to emulate.

  So every night I watched four or more of his episodes, soaking in his words so I could carry his grammar, inflections, and structure with me the next day. I worked harder on that half-hour script than anything I’d ever written and turned it in only when I felt it wouldn’t diminish Rod’s legacy. The night it aired I saw a title card that the seventeen-year-old version of me could never have imagined that night at Southwestern College: Story by Rod Serling, Teleplay by J. Michael Straczynski.