Evolutionary biologist John Haldane was right: “The universe is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine.”
But frankly, I wouldn’t live anywhere else.
While working on the Zone I was having dinner with Kathryn and my agents when Candy said, “You know, you really should write a novel someday.”
I confessed that I had. “It’s a contemporary horror novel in the Stephen King tradition.”
“Why haven’t I seen it?”
“Because it’s sitting in a closet. I just wrote it for myself, to see if I could do it.”
“Let me read it.”
I said that it wasn’t very good and not worth her time, but she pressed the point and the next day I sent over the manuscript for Demon Night.
Three weeks later, Candy called. “Congratulations, you just sold your first novel.”
She’d sent the book via her New York affiliate to Richard Marek, president of E. P. Dutton, who offered to publish it in hardcover with a substantial advance. The book would be published on July 12, 1988, five days shy of my thirty-fourth birthday.
“Now aren’t you glad you mentioned it?” she said. “Always tell me these things.”
But there was something else I hadn’t mentioned to her. For some time I’d been playing with a couple of ideas for an original science fiction series. One was a big, sprawling saga about races from different worlds engaged in a massive war. The story would take years to tell, chronicling the rise and fall of empires, and featured characters who would change radically as they embraced their destinies for good or ill. I loved the idea, but the scale was beyond what could be afforded on a normal television budget. The other story was much smaller, centered on a commercial space station where ships bearing cargo from other worlds could set up shop or continue to Earth after passing through customs.
I couldn’t figure out how to make the saga series small enough to be produced for TV or how to make the stakes in the space station show big enough to be interesting over the long haul. I was about to give up on both of them when something unexpected happened.
Most days, any story problems I’m working on when I step into the shower are almost always resolved by the time I step out again. So instead of thinking about the Twilight Zone script I was supposed to be writing that day, I loaded the two series ideas into my head at the same time . . . and realized that I hadn’t been able to make either of them work because they weren’t two different series.
They were two sides of the same story.
The solution was to put the commercial space station in neutral territory as a diplomatic outpost, where beings from a hundred worlds could work out their differences. When their efforts fail, the resulting war story could be told by reflecting the larger struggle within the smaller confines of the station, much as a World War II story was told through a nightclub in Casablanca.
The moment those wires crossed in my head I saw an entire five-year arc, each season corresponding to a year of story time. If my one-season arc on Captain Power had been a set of training wheels, this was a Harley-Davidson. A five-year arc would echo the five-part structure of a novel—introduction, rising action, complication, climax, and denouement—allowing me to foreshadow events years in advance. I could also create characters who were polar opposites of each other and put them on parallel tracks, weaving them in and out of each other’s lives as counterpoint then reversing their roles in the story. The station would go from a place of peace to the front line of a war, then the center of a new alliance heralding an age of interstellar tranquility.
I expanded the story into a treatment and two-hour spec pilot script then took them to Doug Netter and John Copeland, with whom I had worked on Captain Power. They agreed to help try to sell the series, which I entitled Babylon 5, and thought the process might take at most a few months.
Even now, I laugh.
Chapter 24
Blowing Up the World
In March 1988, two months shy of finishing up the writing season on The Twilight Zone, the Writers Guild of America voted to go on strike. Everyone knew this was going to be messy. The studios had dug in, the writers were tired of being screwed, and neither side was willing to budge. So for the second time since arriving in LA, I was walking a picket line in what would become one of the most volatile and longest labor actions in the union’s history.
The timing couldn’t have been worse. Confident that we would be solvent for a while, Kathryn and I had finally paid off a bunch of long-standing bills, including the last of my student loans, so we had little money in our savings. To distract myself from the sudden shock of not going into an office every day, and since the strike didn’t preclude writing fiction or hosting a talk show pro bono, I focused on Hour 25 while outlining my second novel, OtherSyde.
On July 12, 1988, E. P. Dutton published Demon Night. Holding your first novel in your hands is unlike any other experience. You’re hyperaware of the texture of the pages, the heft and smell of a book that actually has your name on it. I’d put it on the table, walk away, come back, pick it up, and just stare at it. It was also a deeply humbling experience. The publisher had arranged autograph sessions at local bookstores, and with each appearance any fantasies I’d harbored of eager fans lined up to buy the book came to a screeching stop. I would sit alone at a table for hours as customers walked past on their way to buy books they actually wanted. Once in a while someone would wander up and ask what the book was about. I’d tell them, they’d nod for a moment then toddle off. Selling just one or two copies was a victory, even if it was obvious that they were only buying it out of pity. I felt as if I was back on that frozen Paterson street corner, trying to sell bars of World’s Finest Chocolate to people who weren’t there.
Despite the rocky start, the book got decent reviews, sold nicely, and was reprinted in the UK, Germany, Sweden, and South America. It was also nominated for a Bram Stoker Award by the Horror Writers of America for Best First Novel, and though it didn’t win, I took quiet pride in knowing (by virtue of being the awards counter that year) that Stephen King voted for it.
On August 7, 1988, after five months of bitterness and recriminations that resulted in many writers losing their homes and their careers, the WGA strike came to what many still consider an unsatisfying conclusion. The acrimony would take years to heal, but when I returned to my office at The Twilight Zone, Mark dispelled any awkwardness and treated me as the Prodigal Son returned. I buckled down to write as many of the remaining episodes as I could, painfully aware that this opportunity might never come again.
Having grown up rootless, I’d always fantasized about having a proper home, so with the strike over we bought a small house in Sherman Oaks. After moving in, I was working in my new home office when Kathryn stuck her head in the door. “I just opened a letter from someone, I think you better take a look at it,” she said. “You’re not going to believe this.”
The letter, from a woman named Charlean, began, “You may or may not have heard of me throughout your life, but I am your half sister through your father, Charles. I didn’t discover until last year that Charles was my father. All my life it was kept a well-guarded secret in my mother’s family until I decided to pursue the truth.”
The letter included her address, phone number, and an invitation to call. I looked again at her first name. Charlean. As in Charles.
A circuit closed in my brain as I remembered my aunt’s words to my mother: Does Joey know about his sister?
Oh, no, Theresa, he can never know about that.
Another Straczynski secret had emerged from the shadows.
“You think it’s real?” Kathryn asked.
“Only one way to find out,” I said and picked up the phone.
Kathryn shook her head and walked out of the office, throwing back, “Honestly, your family.”
It was all that needed to be said.
My conversation with Charlean confirmed that she was indeed my father’s illegitimate
child, eager to find out as much as possible about the family she’d never known.
“Let me give you a piece of advice,” I said. “There are some family trees that don’t bear shaking. This is one of them. Actually, this is a whole forest of them. You’re infinitely better off for not having known Charles as you grew up. He’s the most evil man I’ve ever met; if you’re smart, you’ll keep your distance.”
She thanked me for my concern but had already made plans to visit him.
She later admitted that my warning had been exactly on target.
Honestly, your family.
Yep.
Several months after finishing work on The Twilight Zone I was still looking for another gig when a call came from Michael Gross, producer of the rebooted Slimer! and the Real Ghostbusters. He explained that the show’s ratings had continued to plummet and they needed my help. “Would you be willing to come back and write some scripts for the show, get us back on track?”
“Sure,” I said, “but I have some conditions. First, I want the authority to argue with the network censors. Second, the Junior Ghostbusters don’t exist. Third, I don’t write Slimer as a kid surrogate—he’s a ghost, he’s a dead thing, and I like kicking the crap out of him. Finally, I want to restore Janine to what she was: an independent, smart, assertive woman, not the submissive, passive mommy character the network turned her into.”
I could feel him wince under the weight of those demands. I was basically asking him to shove a grenade up the network’s ass and pull the pin. Anticipating the battles ahead of him, he sighed and said, “Let me see what I can do and get back to you.”
After I hung up, a part of me said, Don’t be stupid; with the Zone over you could use the money, don’t piss them off. But having gotten The Real Ghostbusters right the first time, I felt some measure of ownership and was too stubborn to back down. I’d write the show the way it was meant to be or not at all.
Michael called back a few hours later. “Done,” he said. “You’ve got a deal.”
Eager to repair the show, my first script up was “Janine, You’ve Changed,” about a demon who, unbeknownst to the rest, had been posing as Janine’s fairy godmother the last two seasons. Feeding off her insecurity about her appearance, the demon convinced Janine to keep changing her look to be more appealing to others. The Ghostbusters help her accept that she’s beautiful just as she is, which banishes the demon and restores Janine to her original appearance.
The censors and consultants who had pushed for a softer Janine hated the story, but there was nothing they could do to stop it. They were particularly furious that the story equated them with a hellborn demon.
Interestingly, the Union of Hellborn Demons Local 666 voiced similar complaints in the other direction.
To drum up interest in the show, ABC asked me to write a prime-time Real Ghostbusters special that would be fast-tracked through the animation process (which normally took up to a year). I said I’d only do it if the daytime BS&P folks had no say in the story. I justified this demand on the grounds that instead of airing on Saturday morning, this would be broadcast in prime time, when programming standards were much more relaxed. They agreed in the belief that I was tired of the constant fights and wanted a break. But that was only partly true. The goal was less about writing a script free from the censors and more about telling a story about them, and if they saw the script before it was produced they’d howl bloody murder.
“The Halloween Door” told the story of Dr. Crowley, a madman with a machine that would destroy all the scary supernatural books in the world because kids shouldn’t be exposed to such things. I even put some of BS&P’s comments in the mouth of the censorship-driven madman to illustrate the idea that however well intended, censors can be as destructive as any demonic entity by curtailing independence of thought.
The kicker? After being falsely accused for years of trying to slip in references to Satan, I named the antagonist after Aleister Crowley, a famous practitioner of the dark arts, often referred to as the most evil man in the world, and not one of the censors caught it.
Idiots.
Then, as seemed inevitable in my work by now, everything blew up.
One of my last Ghostbusters scripts to be produced was entitled “Russian About,” an homage to H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos. As one of America’s foremost writers of supernatural fiction, Lovecraft’s legacy includes a rich history of fictional characters, locations, and books that he encouraged other writers to use in their own works to keep that mythos alive long after his passing. One such book was The Necronomicon, a guide to the elder gods supposedly written by the Mad Arab, Abdul Alhazred.
Let me reemphasize: The Necronomicon doesn’t exist. Lovecraft invented it out of whole cloth. Anyone with a thimbleful of knowledge about literature knows this. So I didn’t think twice about featuring The Necronomicon in my script. Of all the things I’d written for the show that I knew would lead to a fight, this wasn’t one of them.
So I was stunned when Broadcast Standards and Practices fired off a memo saying I couldn’t reference The Necronomicon because “our research has shown that it is a real book associated with Satanism.”
I called bullshit. “Show me your data,” I said. “I want to see what convinced you that a book that has been publicly acknowledged for over sixty years as fictional is actually real.”
The censors blew their collective stacks. By now I’d said they were wrong one time too many, and suddenly I was in a war that ricocheted all the way up to the heads of the network. Their response made it clear that they didn’t care whether or not The Necronomicon really existed; BS&P’s statements could not be challenged whether they were factual or not. If they let a writer successfully challenge their assertions, it could undermine the entire process. They didn’t have to justify their statements even if they proved untrue.
When I threatened to walk off the show again, Ame Simon pleaded for understanding. “Let it go,” she said. “It’s one of the last scripts of the season, and we don’t want a fight. This isn’t a hill to die on.”
As a favor to Ame, who had to live with these jerks, I changed The Necronomicon to The Nameless Book, because if you said the name aloud, terrible things would happen. That compromise seemed to make everyone happy.
That is, everyone except me, and for the second time the voice inside my head that does the actual writing whispered, You’re done with animation. Move on.
I had to agree: the system had been corrupted by censors and consultants, and it was time to go. But while I may have been done writing animation, I was most definitely not done with the Forces of Evil. There was one last battle left in me, so I wrote an article about censorship in network television animation that included some of the incidents described herein. I wanted to blow the lid off the cozy relationship between the censors and consultants, exposing a political agenda that I considered sexist and borderline racist.
My agent urged me not to publish it. “If you expose these guys, you’ll never work in animation again,” she said. “Are you really sure you want to do that?”
She was right, of course. If this article came out, there would be nothing but scorched earth all the way to the horizon. I’d blown up a good gig with the Los Angeles Times over my stubbornness at being censored, ended my journalism career over what I felt were ethical issues, and had now walked off several TV jobs. Was I really prepared to burn down my career in animation over this?
Absolutely.
Never let them stop you from telling the story you want to tell.
Truth, Justice, and the American Way, baby.
Yeah, there would probably be difficult times in the future when it would be helpful to have animation writing to fall back on financially, but publishing the article would be worth every lost dollar. Because this wasn’t about creative disagreements or wanting my own way; it was about confronting a broken system that put itself above correction. The consultants and censors fudged facts and wrapped their prejudice
s in jargon presented as scientific fact to exploit the legitimate concerns of parents, all for their own financial betterment. If I didn’t at least try to punch them in the nose on my way out the door, I could never live with myself.
When confronted by a decision that may have problematic outcomes, I ask one fundamental question: What’s the worst thing that can happen if I do this? If I’m willing to accept those consequences, I do it; if I’m not, then I don’t.
And in this case I was more than okay with the coming blast crater.
Unfortunately, magazines like TV Guide were too cozy with the networks to publish anything this critical, and I couldn’t come up with any mainstream magazines that might care enough about censors vivisecting children’s television to print it. Then I remembered one magazine that had been battling censors for years and might be willing to accept the controversy such an article would stir up.
I sent the article to Penthouse, one of the leading men’s magazines of the time.
A few weeks later their nonfiction editor called to say they wanted to buy the article. “I just have one question,” she said. “Of all the magazines in the world, why pick Penthouse to publish an article about children’s television?”
“Because when the article comes out, these tight-assed consultants and censors are going to want to see what I said about them. I like the idea that the only way they can do that is by buying a magazine full of racy photos. I like that idea a lot.”
On and off, she didn’t stop laughing for five minutes. I clocked it.
Penthouse would go on to publish my article, “TV’s Weirdest Censors: Looking for Satan in Kids’ Cartoons,” in June 1991. Within twenty-four hours my agent heard from every animation studio in town to say that I would never, ever work in animation again.
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