by Ray Succre
Of course, we all have the withery weeks. What summer ushers onto the limbs is dry and weak by autumn. A writer goes through his own private seasons, and there is little warning of when these times will be upon him. Sometimes they wake and hunt him to the month. The writer goes nowhere and looks around and comes back. Then he goes somewhere. Failure is a bit like reconnaissance.
There was a half of a year, shortly after that incident with Arlie and Martin Ward, where a time of rejection sought to comb my hair from my head. I had a drought of money and I was unable to sell anything. Meals suffered, mood dwindled, and my family was given to finding me always in a sort of false cheer that they could see through with ease. A blank page was no longer my comrade in occupation, but had taken on the grim hue of an adversary. I wrote unremittingly, but no one was buying. The uncertainty was overwhelming. The mail would come and I would lean against the kitchen counter in a sort of unfocused surrender while opening the rejections and cancellations. It was a rough six months, and I began to doubt whether I was still viable as a scriptwriter.
One afternoon, I was surprised to discover a letter from Ted Miller. He was a choice producer, a sort of walking trophy for the art of the anthology show, and he still is. I had sent him a script and, for a long duration, had received no response. Finally, Miller’s response came in the mail, and I was certain it would be a rejection. Miller, however, did not reject my script. He wanted not only what I had sent him, but more scripts from me in the near future. He asked that I fly to New York and have a meeting with him, and I did so, a volume of manuscripts on the verge of bursting from my cheap briefcase. They were all I brought, not even a change of clothes. Just months prior, Beth and I had been sitting in the white radiance of our television watching The Bluejackets, and I had remarked how much I would like to work with a producer of that capability, with that sort of large budget, how wondrous it would be to work with someone like Ted Miller.
There I was, at bat with everything I could muster, nervously inhabiting my body in his office. We had two meetings, the first of which had me feeling like a good actor that had been written terrible, phony lines. I found myself sounding like the pitchmen I had disliked so much in my radio days. The second meeting was genuine, and I felt more like myself. Ted informed me he would be buying six of my scripts, and quite possibly more. A show was being designed and had already garnered a strong sponsor, and the series would require many scripts to keep it afloat. This was to be Ted’s show, his baby, from the ground up. He was designing a regular, ongoing gig for himself, and there would be room for others, and he was impressed with my work.
An hour later, I had tipped the bellman at my hotel with extravagance and was letting a baroque bourbon turn my skull into a lantern. I rambled to my wife across the telephone lines in all of my exuberance, and she became just as excited as I. After sobering, that same night, I wrote my way into another script. The shakiness in my knees the previous day was now steady as a concrete foundation. The mathematics in my head, even as they rumbled over the bourbon, were clear: Seven hundred dollars a story, for six scripts, and these were works already written. “And probably more, Asher. Maybe a dozen,” he had said. It felt like free money. A slot machine’s grin. It was as if I had somehow run over every base on a bunt and managed an illogical home run. I felt as if I had won the sweepstakes.
Six weeks later, while sitting in a chair at my home, I received the next letter from Miller. The show had been cancelled. My home run was rescinded. The game had been called because of snow. I had been lifted to the top of a certain mountain and then, while admiring the magnanimous view and my good fortune, had been carried by the wind right off the peak so it could watch me tumble all the way down again. And fast. I did get to work with Ted eventually, but not for the six script gambit that had invigorated us so.
Perhaps it should be said that the tantamount and viable things one can learn about writing for television are those that keep one going. The occasional foray into a series, even short, is a significant boon. An acceptance letter can motivate at just the right time. The meetings that go well but end up facing that not-so-peculiar and tragic destiny of going nowhere are a blessing, as well, as they help to train you for future meetings. You try, is all. You carry your manuscripts and offer them to whoever passes. This is exhausting but never boring and it brings your rare achievements into focus. I have learned much from the good over the past few years, but have I learned the most from the troublesome patches. The slow burn has taught me more than any firecracker could.
The Trouble with the Pecking Order
In the realm of television, I am a hack by general standard, as are all of the industry’s writers, good or bad. Go ahead and let it kink its sound from the hind teeth: Hack. In the classes that comprise television’s hierarchy, the writer is most often thought a resident of Grub Street. An underling rather than accomplice, and a janitor of words into whose mouth they’d be happy to cram a bar bit if they could. The works that leave the typewriter and the scripts that reach production are but the broth for which networks need to settle their meats, the canvas onto which a sales message can be placed, the means to commercials and the vehicle to a product’s representation in both airtime and sponsorship.
This is a medium I have taken much part in, from the start, and it is a medium still thought by many of those in its higher echelon as being foremost a delivery system and not, by traditional means, a form of art. In that mode of thinking, the television writer will never be observed a place in the consideration of art, but will be viewed in the commercial sense. I can think of no more a saddening and dangerous manner with which to consider a writer than by the laws of money. For now, in television, this is his rank. He may climb higher in time, but today, his work is the black soil in which an ad-man buries each thirty-second seed. There is room to move and create still. Despite the ad-man, notwithstanding the compromise, and though the networks divide the acreage and are stingy with the size of spade, it is still great and prolific soil.
Four Shows
On March 20th, 1955, the Carlton Cast Theatre aired the first of the shows based on the scripts in this book, All the System. It was simply another of my scripts, somewhere around my 80th, yet only the 9th to be put into production. I missed the first half of broadcast because I’d forgotten it was being aired that night. My wife and I sat down on the couch and, looking for something to watch, discovered the program mid-way through the second act. We watched the rest of the performance from the living room while I made brief trips into the kitchen to fetch beer and clove tea. My wife was suffering from an unyielding toothache, and so I was keeping eye on her as she sat and sweat in her chair, inundating myself with beer and giving her cups of the slightly anesthetic tea, one after the next. Not five minutes had passed beyond the end of the show when our phone rang. It has not ceased ringing since that moment.
I had attempted the uphill course to success, and had not done well. I was still down below, and though I did not want to wage my campaigns in the trench manner, there I was. Then it happened: The Emmy and a critical start. It is to fortune alone I must infer any success I have had with these shows. People refer to this manner of achievement as the ‘overnight success’, and I am that in many ways. A piece of writing did this, not the bulk of my work, but a single piece. All the System caught the interest of so many, their imaginations turning on it in a way I could have neither anticipated nor tried to engineer. The favor that script culled into being was not only from the viewers, but the critics. After All the System aired, I accrued a dozen offers for television assignments, all of them with little compromise. After the Emmy, another dozen came through the telephone wire, straight into my living room. Screenplays were asked for Hollywood pictures, three of them. There were two offers for possible novels and one for a collection, of which this introduction is in direct relation. In addition to these, I was invited to lunch with a couple of producers from Broadway and there were six interviews placed before me from a vari
ety of publications. Everything that had been rejected prior to All the System began being picked up straightaway and purchased. I had been given a sudden and unexpected crown. A little one, but a crown.
While I was pleased at this attention, the constant comparison of each new show to All the System worried me, and, after time, began to deplete me. I wanted to assure people there were other shows, that I had written and was capable of far more than that one piece, but always a new work was compared to that first success. For me, what at first seemed a shower of kind words had slowly become a nail in the ego. I was not thankless by any means (quite the opposite), but I didn’t want to write more stories like All the System. I wanted to write many things, and I have and will continue to do so, but it was difficult trying to convince people that I had more in me than that first, hit program.
I continued assuring. I’ll Be Sure to Thank Them was a stronger work than any I had written previous, but the critics paled it beside All the System. I thought there was true, earthen salt in the characters of Coronach, but reviewers found the characters not as likeable as those in All the System. The accessibility of The Gardener’s Midnight came through in a sure and careful way (I spent more time with it than I had with previous scripts), and the story had a lot of style, but the only people that thought this, it turned out, were myself and my wife. I began to be referred to as “All the System writer, Emery Asher”.
There was a brief reprieve in this moniker when Naught for Heaven was performed with the Nash Television Theatre. The grandiloquent reviews for this particular piece added the title of that work to my reference, and in the present, I often hear at the outset of a public interview: “Please welcome the writer of All the System and Naught for Heaven, Emery Asher.” One need only refer to the title of the book being read at this very moment to see the extent of this: All the System and Other Works by Emery Asher. While I am no longer expected to repeat that script, its stylizations and particular sort of story, and though I have managed to make much ground with other works, I do have to accept that I might never escape the initial success of that script. It is perhaps a silly and vain complaint. I am thankful for it, of course, but must remain cautious.
Afterthoughts
Always there will be the intrusion of commercials. It is the blind spot in every mirror, being that even when you are unaware of them, they exist and have come to make grand promises and ask their small favors. A writer in television, though he may be given commercial confidence and privilege, works around the advertisers as if a museum tour guide, swaying a hand past all the luxuriant displays for each group of passers-by. Not all commercials are bad, but I dislike them. The phrase is ‘necessary evil’, and that iniquity is what pays for much of the production. I see them as a sort of outlandish uncle that likes to run his mouth, one that you simply have to put up with and, to certain extent, make happy, because he owns your house and fixes the plumbing when the drips occur. Yes, he spouts slogans and clichés, gives his elbow jars to your ribs, and passes gas loudly at the dinner table. Yes, he has his outbursts and winks, and is in the habit of talking down to you as if you were a child that couldn’t possibly understand anything beyond a jingle in his favor. Yes, he inconveniences you, and you wish he were a different sort of person, but he is still your uncle and you are still reliant on him. He is the lord of your particular slum, and he is family. Each of you needs the other, no matter how many frowns and arguments are involved.
This book contains no commercials, though it also comes without their money, which means no actors, score, or set, which is the isolated nature of print. I have taken the reign in these areas by way of introduction. I’m the director in this particular endeavor, as well as the host, and even the mic-handler. What I hope you will enjoy are four of my works, chosen with the aid of J. S. Kemp, a gracious editor and one who’s opinion could sway anyone onto his side in most matters. In addition to All the System, you’ll find The Gardener’s Midnight, Naught for Heaven, and Coronach. All four of these plays have been set into a readable type and they contain a few production notes on their original airings. It is my earnest hope you find in these something you can take away with you, and I am grateful for your attention and interest. It has made me what I am.
Emery Asher, 1958
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Chapter Eleven
“What a dull shit I am. It was... just a real jackass thing to do. Really amateur,” Emery said, sitting in the chair in his living room at just past midnight, holding his youngest daughter against his chest, where she had fallen asleep. He did not want to jostle her. His free hand kept the telephone at his ear and he had leaned back with a posture he would not be able to maintain for much longer. At nearly three-years-old, Vivian was getting too big to hold for durations longer than a few minutes. His older brother was on the line, and they were having the Long Talk, something they found useful and engaged in nearly to the month, even if the conversations at times became contentious, or maudlin.
“How do you mean?”
“Oh, I rattled on and on in this overly dramatic introduction,” Emery confided, “Just made a heel of myself. Really. And it’s way too long. You’ll see when you read it. There are more words in my introduction than there are in any two of the scripts. You open the book and there’s me on page one, yammering on like I was the Emperor of Art.”
“An Emperor of Art.”
“The Don of Writers. I could shoot myself. Peter Wills liked the collection but he panned it due to the introduction. He thought it was arrogant and embarrassingly self-involved. It was, too.”
“Peter Wills is a prick, Em.”
“Sure, but sometimes his pulpit is Time Magazine and Time counts big.”
“Overrated, I think. So you talked about you. What of it? It was your book, after all.”
“Introductions are supposed to be about the work and the author, I know, but there was just too much… me in all that writing I wrote about me. I made it sound like I’ve been championing television for decades, not the four years I’ve actually been doing this. And worse, I made it sound like there weren’t any other writers around. I know a lot of writers and I’m certain I must have pissed off a few. Everything but the kitchen sink went in there. I may as well have called myself a saint.”
“Well, you always did like being overly dramatic.”
“Wills is right, it was arrogant. And shameful. I wish I’d taken a look at a few other introductions before I wrote that. Maybe learned a touch of the humble way.”
“Maybe you got carried away. That’s not so bad, really. A book’s introduction is supposed to be about the history of the work anyway. It sounds like you included all that just fine.”
“Too much. I wish there were a way to unpublish a book.”
“Now, you don’t mean that. I’m sure it isn’t that bad. So you didn’t like your introduction. Big deal. Maybe somebody else will.”
“No, it’s a flop. Some reviewers weighed in on the galleys sent out, and they didn’t like it. Teleplays don’t work in book format. And nobody’s gonna buy it. Billo & Samuel are already talking about dragging the price down to a humiliating minimum and it hasn’t even hit the shelves yet. Toilet paper will be worth more.”
Perhaps the critical nature with which the book had been reviewed was the culprit behind his embarrassment. The panning by reviewers, the weird rapture with which fans held him and that was decidedly undeserved... Writers could tell how good they were by the quality of their fans, and Emery’s, scattered as they were, demonstrated a character nearly deaf to reason. The book would be a humbling washout, his pig-headedness separated into two hundred pages plus four, and affixed within a cover by an incessant need for attention.
Getting carried away with something. That was apt in phrase; Emery often grasped his own works and name and attempted to elevate them up the boughs, though for none of these levels did he feel a particular kinship. This was carrying something in the basest sense. He carried his work to New York in exh
austing drives. He carried his name in a mouth that was beginning to talk too much. He did not belong in New York, writing for her producers and directors, making space for the announcements of her products. Yet there he was, often for a week at a time. He did not belong away from New York. He no longer wore the Li’l Abner shoes, but the simpler life in his home was too far removed from his activity. He spent hours affixed to the telephone, days and nights over a typewriter, taking short breaks with the telephone hot against his ear. He was being carried away, and often, by his own sense of drive.
“In the defense of toilet paper, I would admit that it is quite useful. They should print books on it, really,” William said.
“Maybe so.”
“Don’t be so hard on yourself. You just want to be liked,” William said, “and you have been; you’re just not getting much of it right now.”
“I’m that childish?”
“I know you, little brother. In a few days, you’ll be on to the next thing and this will be the past. You’re Toad of Toad Hall.”