by Ray Succre
Being given lectures showed there was some respect for him floating around, but not where he worked, not where he hunted his game. That was being held in regard by strangers of little connection to his day-to-day life. No, the lectures were more a joint-effort between one writer and those other writers and instructors that better understood the reality of where he lived and labored.
Having the respect of the television world stripped from him in the odd manner this had occurred was as if laying in bed for hours on end, trying to get into that comfortable, wondrous mode of sleep always just out of reach, always about to happen. He could suppose that this was a sort of torpor, an awful predicament, but no more so than the troubling narratives that often occurred when he did reach his comfort and sleep. Work was the thing. A creative sort of man needed to continue working, to make each thing better than the previous. Emery was driven and moving, and this was enough to satisfy his ethic, so long as he could remain optimistic that those things beyond his scripts were going to get better, as well. So long as he kept his grip and breathed. He and Emery Asher were somewhat different people now.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
When Joe Collery had agreed to become Asher’s ace in the hole, it was expected he write in the manner Emery was accustomed. Collery had been hired because of his seven scripts that had aired on The Other Side, but also because he was a large man with a stern voice who looked up to Emery much. Joe Collery had expressed a certain respect for Emery early on in their previous work together, and had contributed here and there. At first, Emery did not want to use another writer from the Orange Grove group, due to its relationship with Orson Banry, who presided over it as a figurehead, but Emery was a beggar in this instance, and needed to take the lesser of evils. Despite Emery’s troubles with Banry, the novelist’s writer friends had always been excellent providers. Perhaps using a writer from the Orange Grove might calm Banry down a bit and settle things. Their squabbles in the past still weighed on Emery’s mind.
He was aware of the hypocritical dilemma he had brought to life: Emery wanted Joe Collery to write what Joe had written before, new stories but in a particular vein. Emery had learned quickly, however, that Collery was a multi-talented individual, and did not like to write the same thing repeatedly. Emery had the same ethic, a drive to attempt new things while perfecting old things. Alas, within a few months, Emery began to understand that having Collery write for The After Hours could be more of a burden than a blessing. Instead of staying with Emery in ideal, promoting a singular vision for the show, he bickered with the network writers over other things.
Collery could not be contained. He had become a bit of a lone gun, with his own ideas, and while this was a great thing in a writer, it was also serving to water down Emery’s chances at seeing his own ideas reach fruition. Among other things, Joe Collery was supposed to be Emery’s supportive constituent, that the two of them together might steer more of the show, but Collery had instead become a spoiler, dividing the vote. Emery had hired a man who now tended to stir things up more than settle them. Unless Emery began doing the same, kicking up dust with Collery, the two would simply get in one another’s way, and the show would suffer. Ed Baird held a strong dislike of Collery, and the two clashed creatively. Joe Collery had only ever written episodes for various shows. He had never been a member of a program’s roster staff. He had schooled in the university of guest writing, exclusively. Now that he was a bona-fide writer for an anthology, and not simply a guest writer contracted for two or three episodes, Emery was learning that Joe Collery had never learned how to kiss ass, collaborate, or weather the bad days. These abilities were crucial in the television world, if a writer was going to stick around longer than a few episodes.
At the season’s halfway point, there had been so little depth to the stories The After Hours had aired. The title sequence was excellent, the music haunting, and the direction was good, most of the time, but the writing and the way scripts were handled was quite troublesome. Ed Baird, the producer, went over every script and rewrote them to his preference, and some days, this preference grated on Emery with fervor. The show had embarked on a sea of mediocrity, and from there degraded into a thing to which Emery did not want to remain attached. The contract for the show served as a bissus, however, and kept him affixed to the sinking rock expertly. He was required to write 50% of the episodes for a second season, if one was to be granted, and he was working hard to fulfill this, but Baird had begun rejecting much of Emery’s work. Creative control was empowering Ed Baird into the vision the man had in his mind, but that vision was unpredictable and highly sporadic. Emery submitted for approval, and was summarily sent home with rejections.
In previous engagements, this would not be much of a problem, as he was paid a small amount for the submitted scripts whether or not they were used. The executives for The After Hours, however, all of them somewhat new and fresh, young and talented sorts with eyes for business, were considering the rejected scripts a failure on his part to reach his quota. To them, anything that was rejected did not count toward his 50%, which meant he was in danger of not meeting the contractual percentage, which would not only put him in breach of contract, but could become a lawsuit. The irony was that he had written nearly thirty scripts in the past year, and only two of them had been chosen for production. He was meeting his contract’s quota quite well, but the quota was not allowing him in due to Baird’s rejections. Worse, he felt these were some of his best new scripts, yet they were incessantly sent back as unacceptable. Baird had also begun taking Emery’s rejected scripts and rewriting them himself, bringing them to meetings from time to time and accepting his own draft against Emery’s will. Did this count toward the fulfillment of Emery’s quota? That depended on Baird’s mood, and whether Emery thought Baird was a genius yet, or not.
It seemed the network had a particular few ideas for the show, as well, but these remained almost as mysterious and vague as Baird’s vision. They spoke only with producers, and Emery was not one of those. Despite Ed Baird’s befuddling interferences and off-putting, anti-social attitude, his unpredictable nature and his hit-or-miss meetings, Baird did prove quite adept at keeping the network producers at bay. He had a knack for pleasing them, likely due to the side work he did rewriting scripts for a variety of other shows. The network often sent him scripts whenever they were in a pinch. He was a good writer in the studio sense, but his conceits were invisible and his talent was in melding the work of others into the work a network enjoyed. He did this by transfiguring the work heavily.
Emery could see the rising tide and the particularly low rock to which he had strapped himself. Giving up creative control had been a sovereign mistake. By the start of the second season, the show was already devolving into mostly shock stories, gore and jumps at the camera, and these contained so little merit outside of the moments in which the corny devices occurred. This was giving the show a quickly stacking culmination of embarrassing scenes. They were silly, passing dots of tawdriness.
Passed down from the network clouds was the commandment that an episode would now be twenty-four minutes, leaving six for commercials. These episodes could have been told in five, however. It was as if the newest viewing public had somehow forgotten that a story was only worth seeing or hearing when that story was worth telling. No one wanted to tell these stories but the younger, inexperienced writers, and even they were quick to laugh at one another’s work before moving on to the next project. It was as if the writers on the show didn’t care about what they were writing at all. Why were they writers if they had no interest in creating something of their own? This was business to them, not art. They were enterprise writers that thought they were, by having written a script or two, the better fellows of Shakespeare. They wrote little things, gimmicks and gags, quickly aborting any trace of meaning in favor of more little things.
A white man, who apparently desecrated an ancient tomb while on vacation, walks to his mailbox once he’s back home and sees a
mummy shamble out from an alleyway. He panics and runs. He ends up in the black neighborhood. No one will help him. A young black man tells him to go away, to lead the mummy out of their neighborhood. The white man runs some more, hides, runs, hides, and finally, the mummy cuts him off and grabs him. The man yells and is killed. Then the mummy shambles toward the young black man, who happens to be nearby. Oh no. The mummy’s still coming. Apparently, there’s something about racism or segregation or being neighborly. The critics will figure something out of all that. Cut to credits. Supposedly there was a ‘lesson to be learned’ in that neighbors, even those of differing races and neighborhoods, should help one another. This was pointless doctoring when the story was so crass, however. It was a dry, rag-monster, and either of the two men could have probably stopped that mummy with a book of matches. Another stupid monster story written by the network kids.
More troublesome than the simple scripts was that the network had promoted both of the younger, inexperienced writers. Emery and Joe were treated with big smiles and handshakes but ushered off quickly. They weren’t invited to many of the meetings. When they did catch wind of one and infiltrate it, their ideas were always heard out, and then quietly dismissed once they were no longer standing there. One of the studio writers had become a supervising producer, and the other, a smooth-talking man, had been given reigns as an executive producer. It had been a mistake for Emery to give up creative control, but this trouble was not as grievous as when the two in-house writers were granted such vast control of the program. Baird and his two writers had become presidential in mood. This meant that The After Hours was their show in all ways, essentially making Emery their employee, rather than a seasoned, heavily-awarded writer who had ventured down Prime-Time Lane numerous times, a man from which much could be learned.
The After Hours was not Emery’s show. It never really had been, and the hacks were now his overseers, reacting to him in the way animal-handlers treated a misbehaving dog. Why had he been offered a show in the first place? What point was there in keeping him involved with The After Hours at all? Though worse for wear, his name was that reason. His name solely. The studio wanted to place his name in the opening animation with large letters and a bold face:
EMERY ASHER’S
The After Hours
This was contrived, and with obvious intent to make the show seem his, to assure the public that Emery Asher was writing and hosting these episodes, that the show was all his. The public believed it. He was being molested behind the curtain while the novices flashed their scripts and the actors flubbed their lines. He had been hobbled and was now strapped down, nude, to a titlecard bearing his name. Emery did not want to believe that. There had to be more to his functioning role than simply his name and appearance.
When the vampire cackled in his dull, faux-Transylvanian accent and made for the heroine’s neck, when the blood spurt on the camera lens and the scream was heard, Emery’s name was there. When the exploitation episode aired, the one that depicted a group of young black men as angry, criminal hipsters that help an old, southern, white hick get hung from a tree by the ghosts of slaves, Emery’s voiceover was there. Every woman was screaming in fright and every man wanted to fight some monster that would invariably kill him, if only so the audience could hear the woman scream again. And this was all thought to be Emery’s doing, the dramatist who had either lost his edge or had sold out in the most utter and complete manner possible.
He had committed to a number commercial spots in the past, as a way to make a bit of income until his career started up again, and now he had to make do on several of them, performing for the advertisers, hawking their products as he watched his name get injected weekly with the taint of bad writing. The commercial endorsements and the grating audacity of cheap thrills on the show acted as a one-two punch to any trace of respectability he might have still grappled to keep. He was fucked. His new image was an ugly disaster of hackneyed devices and bad writing, writing not approximate to his own, and it wore him like a cheap suit.
The show was garbage, and everyone thought Emery was its progenitor and lord. They saw his fronting of the show and his name in the animation and his face in the lights. They watched his introductions and closers, wherein he was required to speak as if these episodes were worth even a tatter of their attention. A thirty-second spot praising Reuter’s Diet Cola was bad enough, but now even his monologues had become as if bad commercial endorsements for yet another bad product. Worst of all was that he was that shitty product, himself.
The reviews were so awful that he had stopped reading them. The Emmys sat in his study staring at him as if he were a son that had disgraced his elders. As far as the public was concerned, he may as well have been a vibrator buzzing away its last bit of power at the bottom of a garbage can. Emery Asher now seemed like an arrogant writer who had lost his abilities outright but refused to go away.
There had been a few episodes that had pulled in a touch of deference. Not all was bad. The world had taken on the situational comedy as its mainstay for television, but this had caused uncommon and elusive dramas to be given more scrutiny and attention. In those rare instances one of his scripts was accepted and shot, the reviews became positive; the critics displayed a fair amount of interest. This could nearly be plotted on a graph: The more of Emery’s writing taken on, and the less Baird intervened with that script, the better the reviews were. Collery was running in the same mode. His scripts made for strong episodes. The two of them would salute one another, but then the next episode would air, a stinker that one of the vomiters had poured out, and the public would look upon whoever had previously praised the show with a shake of the head. It was becoming a bit taboo to be fond of Emery Asher. The critics knew who wrote what, as it was listed at the back end of the final credits, but the reviewers and public did not pay much attention to this, or even watch the final credits. It was easier to change the channel and begin inadvertently supporting whatever other show at which they happened to stop.
While the reviews of episodes written by Emery Asher or Joe Collery were strong, these reviews meant little to the overseers. The network and the empowered two writers, as well as the most empowered writer, Ed Baird, did not see reviews so much as they saw those numbers of viewers the network relied on. They had learned a new and particularly mischievous facet of the art: Getting people to like something was not nearly as important as getting someone to merely watch it. By this mode, and had they the gall to attempt it, a half-hour of a woman sitting on a toilet would have given them the highest ratings in history. The onlookers had trumped the view, it seemed, and become it. This convinced the advertisers that there were hordes of people tuning in to the show. Even if these people were only there to stare at the blood spatters and make fun of them, or to zone out and do nothing but watch a silly story for a half-hour. No matter the reason, this was popularity, and these were, in the technical sense, viewers.
The short term was the new game. Get them to watch for part of a season, then throw the show into the ground and quickly find another that could keep the viewers watching a little longer, one with new characters and an ever-so-slight alteration in story. A show did not need to have fans, but rather, simply be new enough to get people to watch it for a short while. “New” meant instant watchers, for a time. If a network kept throwing new things at an audience, the audience kept tuning in to that network. The ever-changing line-up had become the spectacle, rather than any show, itself. There were longstanding shows still being aired, but only those rare few that survived being new, and many of these seemed chosen as if by lottery.
The advertisers were ready, of course. They had money and they went for whatever was being watched the most. The shows seemed designed to play off one another. Eventually, one of these random shows would make it into the long-term, would prove itself popular and bankable, and that was when television would be said to innovate again. The networks no longer fished for whales, they dredged the sea for miles and dumped
it all on the docks for the audience to pick through. This, it seemed, was enough to bring the viewers back, repeatedly, simply because they didn’t know what they might find.
The cancellation of The After Hours was obvious, and an utter relief to him. After a full year of attempting to write for the third season of the cursed show, and another four months of having nearly given up even returning phone calls regarding it, The After Hours was officially going to close. Emery was relieved and thankful for this turn of events, yet angry over the sullying the show had done to his reputation. His name was all he had left, and it was now diseased. A new wave of people were running television, all having taken over in the last eight years or so, and many of them had no idea what he had actually done in the past or why. They saw a slight celebrity they remembered from earlier days, despite that those earlier days were but a decade past. Perhaps a decade was a long time, anymore. It felt quite short to Emery.
Banry had attempted another lawsuit against him, this time over an episode of the failed show, but had discovered in doing this that Emery had not even written that episode; one of the network writers had authored the dull thing. It was no more an act of plagiarism than the past lawsuits against Emery had alleged, and the networks had come down on Banry quickly and with much weight. The lawsuit was rescinded as abruptly as it had begun, and even Joe Collery, who admired Banry greatly, thought the aged novelist was getting what he deserved for filing so many frivolous copyright lawsuits. There had been others over the years, not simply those filed against Emery Asher.