by Ray Succre
Beth had heard his complaining at home. She must have expected he would leave WKCR eventually. Was she truly so surprised and upset as she seemed, or was she putting him through the grinder a bit, as was likely right of her? He could have used some fatherly advice just then, but this was not to be. Perhaps William would have something to say on the notion of quit jobs and artistic gambles.
FADE OUT
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FADE IN
Things had changed. Freelance writing could be a protagonist, not just a bumbling side character taken out when the scene was busy. It could be the bread and butter if he worked it right.
“I know you didn’t plan on this, and... and who does? Or, as it goes, having another baby so soon. But I know we’re going to have a great family. It’s a given, Beth, and you have to know that there’s nothing I won’t do to keep us well.”
That was hypocritical, and a bit of a puffer, itself. He wouldn’t work at the station anymore. He wouldn’t write in the manner that, to date, had assured him pay. There were things he wouldn’t do to keep the family well, and with a second child on its way, the window of his opportunity was incredibly slim. He had not only quit his job, but he had done so with his wife pregnant and with an infant daughter to consider, which made his rash action progressively more foolish, if not entirely conceited. He had to make it work immediately. No room for coasting in, getting a feel for things, making the necessary alignments with the right people. He would have to go at it tooth and nail, and likely start blind. The thought of those coming days was fatiguing, but his imagination was woozy and his hands ready to work in the means he wanted.
Beth knew the world of free-lance writing quite intimately. Through college and for two years after, she had watched her boyfriend, and eventually, her husband, slap his face against the keys, free-lancing while testing parachutes for the Air Force, then while being a fry-cook, and then, having moved to Cincinnati, free-lancing while working more than full-time at WKCR, in attempt of propping his various works on the radio world. He had sold only six shows, and his best season had been just before giving up free-lance. Emery had netted the compulsory and dismal amount of two-hundred and ninety dollars in extra income, for the entire year. These were not bad scripts, but lacked the polish of his full attention, she supposed. They bore the hints of a writer with much else on his mind and a double-time job. He had decided to give up free-lancing and focus on a steady job as a New Year’s resolution at the start of 1950. The new decade. The new Emery and Beth. And just in time for their soon-to-be nuclear family. Now, he was reneging on that resolution.
Beth had lived his writerly struggling enough, which made asking her to return to it even more troublesome. She was being asked to do what, in her mind, was probably a devolving, a retreat back to his manic pace, without the security of an accountable, wage-providing job. Emery’s idea was like running back and forth across the highway and waiting to be picked-up by a car with a winner inside. It was panning for lusterless gold at the bend of a dry, suffocated river. She understood there would be lean days that drove him to dipsomania, and fragrant days that drew him to pride. Free-lance was educated lottery, and there was no telling where the numbers might fall, no definition of a well-placed bet. His confidence was all that served to pamper this, but it was not, in general, assuring. The incessancy of this confidence actually made him seem a bit insecure, which was worrisome, if not dubious.
“We’ll be fine. I just need a little time to make things happen, for all three of us,” he said before catching himself and correcting, “I mean all four of us.”
Beth nodded and let her gaze leave the Howard Johnson’s. Her eyes through the window at the pass of cars were a mind deep in thought. She was twenty-three and four months into a second pregnancy. These things were heavy stipulations in her thinking, and made for a heft of uncertainty.
Emery was antsy, so leaned back in his chair and glanced around the restaurant, letting her be, dodging the stiffness in the air for a few moments by examining his surroundings, checking his watch, thinking up boy and girl names for the baby only five-months away. Near him were both the well-dressed and the plain, those eagerly beginning at their meals and those full, picking a bit, having been satisfied. All of them by his immediate impression were steady. All with paychecks, whether great or small, that provided at the least, just enough. Through the kitchen’s pane-less jalousie, a head emerged. Lieutenant Merrill of the Confederacy. His cap had been replaced by a cook’s hat and saber with a silvery spatula. He eyed his protege, Emery, with a sigh and slowly shook his head before returning attention to his fry-table and the incessant flipping of seasoned burger.
“I love you,” Emery said, then. Beth stirred and looked him over in thought.
Writing free-lance was like bleeding, and his emotional stability while active in it had been shaky. His frustration with writing would at times corner him, give those great wallops one knew to expect and yet could not dodge. The route he now proposed (by embarking on it) was an uncertain future, as well as disregard of a certain past. Free-lance. He felt he knew it better, and could make ground this time, and not fall into the no-hoper shoes, but this semi-qualified assurance in him did not alter that Beth Asher was married to a man who’s pluck and poise, his very confidence, might be drowned and left to the silt with that ever deep, tidal motion of rejection. These would come often, the rejections, just as they had before. With that particular, slow tide would creep Emery’s more dilapidated moods. Bad days would come, predictable only in that they would strike at noon, and begin with a postman’s uniform.
Beth lightly took his hand and gave it a small squeeze before offering a wink. Then she released the hand and lifted a fact-card from the table’s center, began reading mildly to herself. That was all. No talk, no rebuttal, and no exposed nerve. No permission, no denial, just life. She was adept at reading the score, had done so, and said nothing. Their financial future, for the time being, would be entirely on his gamble. It’s what he wanted, and it was what he would get. She chose not to resent him for it, but she would judge.
Outside the Howard Johnson’s, wood-grain guitars struck the ground, raining from the grey above and shattering each in a lush ministry of twang. Medicine bottles collided with boy-howdy crooners atop carts and buildings, breaking their glass and gushing out in paint-spatters of licorice and booze, dripping down on worksheets and hot-dogs and flatulent, pre-written testimonials. Knee-slapping, hayseed gags riffed across the air, carrying by their loft a gaggle of used car flyers, these in turn torn to bits by the plummeting weight of corpses, every evangelical, go-lucky emcee in a loose crumple to the ground. All of it raining to the floor and washing away into a cheering, requisite obscurity. Frank Gill rowed through this in his slow, smoldering canoe, looking for an ashtray. So long, Red Room. Farewell Green Hills. Thank you for listening, thank you and good night.
He sighed and watched Beth’s eyes read the fact-sheet, loving her more than ever. Whether the waves in the distance would be riotous or comatose, or the stores of his mind prove fertile or bankrupt, he had now set out his skiff, that he might find a fleet, somewhere, in need of him.
He had launched a fictional career.
Chapter Eight
The age of television was no longer in its infancy. The cathode device and its all-to-needy antennas were not fed or burped when there was trouble, but programmed the more, expected to walk and attempt speaking like the rest of us, to understand repercussion and to act, in the least, cute or distinguished. The primitive root of Philo Farnsworth’s medium had been dug out and washed, dipped in chromium, and now sat exposed in the nation’s recent past. What was needed anymore were accords and momentum, proof that people were represented not simply well, but with realism intersected with drama.
“Em, this chicken has turned. Can you go to the grocery?”
“Sure. I’ll take Rebecca along.”
Television might give people an on-air existence more comprehensive than the cartoon-like caricature with which radio had slapped them, and perhaps this new medium might have the gumption to keep bettering itself. More stage might be present with less treatment, a little bit of the outside world one could watch without entering it. Television was an attractive toddler. What remained was to see if this system was going to grow up dim and compulsive, or take on the characteristics of intelligence and art, aspects that radio seemed, in great mischief, to have lost overall, and traits that the film industry had gobbled up, digested, and relinquished. Radio was subdued and most projects Hollywood touched bore strong elements of remedial copycatting and the “do-like-the-previous” mentality. Hollywood had its masterpieces, and radio still aired Oboler and Chayefsky and the serial dramas, but these were becoming the exception rather than the rule. Television had not yet fallen to overwhelming commercialism, not yet, and was too young to pander itself past its lively core.
This strange childhood of the television industry was causing much consternation for program directors in the medium. They knew they wanted something to come of it, and they wanted to aim high, but no one really knew what to do with the system, or how it should work. The television was lodged in a ridiculous number of homes now, so there would certainly be advertisements to put on them, and money to be made in stacks, but beyond this... what sort of programming was there? What could there be? Drama seemed natural enough, but wanted to be something beyond what radio and Hollywood were doing with that genre. Television might serve shows well, episodic stories and serials as in radio, with news and sporting events, but then given the effort and budgeting, the storytelling and dynamism that was often put into the motion pictures. And what about the motion pictures? Shouldn’t they be shown on televisions once they left the theaters? It could be a place for them to reside, instead of being forgotten at the end of summer. A movies could have its general run and then retire to television, making more money and staying relevant longer.
“William wants to visit, hon. I told him September.”
“Oh? How is William?”
“Good, I think. He says he’ll be bringing that girl he’s been seeing, Helen.”
“That sounds serious, then!”
“Oh, I bet he proposes by the end of the year. I know my brother too well.”
Emery made his necessarily small attempts at submitting to various networks and stations, adding more work to his reservoir as he did so. Within several months, he had increased his submissions near ten-fold. He began to get a feel for the current, which shifted without clemency and dodged one’s ability to anticipate it. One could navigate the waters, but not predict them. He also bought script copy from various broadcasters, putting him deeper in the monetary hole, but deriving a strong sense of what others were writing.
He began to observe that most writers handled the television script in the most natural way, for a stage. He took notes. The writers that caught his eye seemed to build stories based on what they already knew about writing for performance: They wrote stageplays and adapted older plays for a small screen. They tried writing short cinema. They wrote for the theater, but with a nudge of knowledge in Hollywood’s poses, and with slots for commercial as in radio. After all was roughed down, they scrambled their brains trying to figure out where on that stage they could stick a camera. This worsened when certain programs began using more than one camera, and the use of directives gained power.
“Get it in the sink, hurry! What were you thinking?”
“I was thinking there wouldn’t be that much oil to drain.”
The stage play was an ancient art, and utilized actors that could carry in voice and long strings of memorized lines, in order that the audience might hear each one, but on the screen, this format was overbearing and too sentimental, too dramatic and coated every scene. A play's result had but the single view, whereas the motion picture product had angles, direction, and scenes that unfolded outside of one’s vision until the moment a certain cut would show them. Television was attempting to be as its earlier progenitor, the theater, and taking account of tactics borrowed from radio when it came time for news and announcements. All of it was quite loud and overly enunciated. Television was adamant about being noticed. This was fine for those things requiring the broadcaster tint, or the thespian’s most live art, but regarding story, the pace and method of television was thus far inept. Live stage did not translate onto a screen, as Hollywood had learned in its own, raucous start.
“Still not a peep.”
“Well, she’ll talk when she’s ready. She’ll say ‘Oh, mother dear, I am quite tired. Might I have a nap?’”
“If she’s anything like you, she’ll never nap. ‘In a minute, in a minute, in a minute,” she’ll say.
The stage play system ruined the mode and suspension for screen drama by giving everything from the calm talk of two people in a quaint dialogue, to the slow drive down an old road in the cutout of a car, the obtrusive feel of an outburst. It was unnerving, sudden, and felt important even when it was not. The actors nearly shouted their lines and their voices carried a clear resolve, cameras staring right into their faces. The thespian approach, so vital at the start, now bore the look of the overly dramatic and forced. No one wanted to be acted at while sitting at home. An audience wanted to watch, up close if possible, but remain invisible. They were not asking for a night out and a show. They were home, the place of relaxation and day’s end. They were asking for something to look at while they sat on couches, in their quiet p.m.
The look of Hollywood, the tradition and design of a stage play, the informative and highly serialized nature of radio... all of it was being wrapped and shot and placed on the air with the feel of a rushed magazine article. This somewhat fit in with the domestic feel of being home for the night, but was cloying and sporadic. The living room was no place for the blockbuster sensation. Television was a different beast, and its mannerisms had yet to truly evolve and take form.
“William! Ah, it’s good to see you, brother. How was the flight?”
“We’re here. There was a lightning storm near the end. Scared the life out of us.”
“And you must be Helen. Hello!”
The close-up. The extreme close-up. Panning. Zooming. Dissolving and wiping and fading. Dolly shots and all the angles. No stage-play had ever had so much intricacy in direction. No curtain needed to slide across an out-of-view, rusty rail to expose something hidden, no large prop needed to move; you simply panned the camera over to a portion of the set that didn’t exist before. No baritone shout was needed to show a man was angry, no jerk of his body as if by a temper’s seism; like cinema, you went right up to his face and saw the frustration through the lens, up close and real. Hollywood had mastered these properties of cameras and actors and story. The quiet scenes had evolved. With television, the drama of expression could be seen no matter where the public seats were, because those seats were front row no matter where the signal reached. Television could be intimate with strangers by the simple device of a zoom on a person’s eyes, and in the home, where intimacy was more expected or favored. The audience did not see the set, just the frame. You didn’t have a shocking sound or visual get their attention so they might see the man sneaking up from stage left. You turned the
ir heads for them. To center stage, the upper boughs, even behind them. You told the audience what to see with the clever use of a man behind a glass-faced machine and the reeling of film.
Emery knew that writing plays for television was not enough for the industry or public to consider a television writer a playwright. The writers were anonymous and hidden. It was rare to display those rustling plumes of story between the longer programs of wrestling and football. Their names did not often appear in credit. As Emery watched program after program, learning about the networks and the nature of television, he saw so few names of writers, instead reading the names of directors, producers, and the smaller names so quickly ignored by most of the public. The often uncredited writers typed out slender fictions between the folds of a televised, real thing.
“This jackass sent me a rejection for someone else’s script. Is mine still under consideration, you think?”
“Can you call him?”
“I tried, the number is disconnected. Operator can’t get through.”
For Hollywood, immediate-nonfiction did not exist beyond the newsreels at the beginnings of films. Everything was a production, required much time, even when rushed, whereas the grit of a television was its proclivity to show you something actual within a very short time of the event occurring, or possibly live on a short delay, as in radio. When Stanford played Washington, one could watch the quarters unfold, every play and call and mad dash, not simply listen through a speaker and a touchy dial. These events were real. They were more than elsewhere. They were before the viewer. Right there. Radio had functioned in the second hand, a world of gossip and hearsay. People heard the crowd and commentary of a boxing match, but were not given the boxing. The discreet public was not there; people were eavesdropping. Hollywood depicted a choreographed reality and one could go and see it, could admire the depiction. Television was unlike these formats. When television showed a thing, the public turned and watched, even idle, from the front row as all-American McColl cradled a lob of leather and scuttled his feet all the way to the zero yard. No other medium could show you a game that was happening in the present.