Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

by Harlan Ellison

  Attaining success in Hollywood is like climbing a gigantic mountain of cow-flop, to pluck from the top one perfect rose. And you find, after having made that hideous ascent…that you have lost the sense of smell.

  The late Charles Beaumont, himself a writer of stature who was compelled to make the ascent, said that to me when I arrived in Clown Town. I was filled with spice and flame about Hollywood hacks and how they ground out lousy scripts for the fastbuck, thus enabling them to get hammered that much quicker while frying beside their swimming pools.

  Lord, how the silly have fallen. Lessons learned, ah me. Five years, two dozen scripts, and several lobotomies later, I sit here behind the typewriting machine that has earned me my living, and I wonder—where did it all go? That innocence of childhood or nature that once I possessed.

  One of these days, when my soul comes back Martinized from Beelzebub, Sathanus and Daemon: TV Producers and Dry Cleaners (sale of same was one of the unalterable conditions of my last script-writing contract with them, to plot a one-hour seg of their top-Trendex-rated series, Darwin a Go-Go). I will write a funny novel about a good writer slowly masticated ’tween the teeth of the television industry. It will be based on my experiences.

  It will be titled “Dial 9 To Get Out.”

  It won’t really be funny. It will be gallows humorous. Music of sackbut, lyre, and dulcimer; with a capella accompaniment interstitially by the rattle of doomed souls. I will cry as I write it. It won’t sell. No one would believe it.

  How could anyone be expected to believe:

  I am sitting in a conference with I. A. Trepidation, producer of the new adventure series SubSunk, his four aides, the Sycophant Brothers, and a network executive I shall hereafter refer to as The Mole (chiefly because he has never seen the light). We are discussing my forthcoming script for the series. The Mole is at the far end of a monstrously long table, and I am being urbane, smiling just a bunch.

  The Mole has been performing what is euphemistically referred to as Network Continuity on my work. He has been “bettering” my script by offering suggestions such as the following: “Mr. Ellison, you have a character here named Philip Trelawney, don’t you?” I nod, assured. “Well, you can’t have that, you know.”

  “Why not?” I ask this, naive lad that I am, wide-eyed and innocent of the essential grisliness of reality.

  “Because it’s an English name.”

  He pauses. He’s trying to tell me something. I am stupid. I do not understand. “Right. English,” I say. I am delighted at his immediate grasp of the intricacies of the plot. “But why not?”

  “Because it might offend.”

  “Whom?” I inquire, grammatically.

  “The English.” He explains this to me as if I were a waterhead: in broad terms, like a Giant Golden Book.

  Reeling, I counter: “Uh, okay. Would you like me to change it?”

  He lips a knife-thin piranha grin.

  I do a Huck Finn. “How about Philip Wesley?”

  He nods agreement.

  I have cleverly substituted an English name for an English name.

  This was the sanest exchange of the conference.

  “And here at the big finale in the last act—” The Mole jabs a finger at my script (my script groans from the prod), “—when you have the female spy holding a gun on the crew, about to open the hatch to flood the submerged sub…”

  “Yes, yes, go on!” I breathlessly exclaim.

  “…well, have one of the crew jump her, and grab at her face and rip off this rubber mask she’s wearing, and she’s not beautiful, but really ogly!” He sits back, delighted with himself.

  There is an extended moment of silence such as one finds only at the bottom of the Cayman Trench.

  From the tomb I ask softly, “Why?”

  Indrawn breaths from Trepidation and the Sycophant Brothers; David dares to question Goliath. An affront!

  The Mole leans forward and steeples his fingers before him. He looks like Torquemada on the scent of a heretic. “Because I saw it in From Russia, With Love, and I liked it.”

  “Yeah, well, I saw it in From Russia, With Love, too, and I liked it, but what the hell does it have to do with the script?”

  “Nothing, but it looks good. So use it.”

  “No thanks, friend.” I am getting a steely tone in my voice. “I will not use it. It’s gratuitous, silly, and stolen from someone else’s work. I have this thing about obvious plagiarism. We won’t use it.”

  Secure in his power, The Mole snarls. “Don’t argue with me, kid, just use it! Writers are toadies, they do what they’re told.”

  And I go berserk. I run amuck. I climb on the table, scuttle down its length and fasten on him, shrieking hideous obscenities. It is the culmination of hours of demeaning acquiescence on my part, of arrogant stupidity on his part, of a systematic evisceration of anything meritorious and original in my creation. I attack him.

  I was intent that he should go to his grave with my teeth in his throat. I hauled back and drove one right into the center of his imbecilic face. He went over backward in the chair and hit the edge of a low table standing behind him against the wall. The table fell and as he sat there on his ass a full-scale model of the U.S.S. Guava Jelly—the sub used in the series—fell on him.

  I was salivating like a Pavlovian dog.

  Trepidation and two of his Sycophants hauled me off, twitching most horribly and, still doing a cardio-vascular adagio, I was manhandled into the next office, where they forced me into a padlocked chair (reserved for deranged writers). “Whaddaya tryin’ to do, Ellison, kill me with the network?” Trepidation stood before me, twitching and sweating. His funny little belly protruded from under his shirt-jac like Fat Stuff, the character in the Smilin’ Jack comic strip who was always popping off buttons that were instantly gobbled up by a chicken always following him around. I. A.’s eyeballs protruded, too: Trepidation is a very outgoing man.

  He pleaded, a rising note of hysteria in his voice, “Do it, willya, please do it! Or we will!”

  Later, when they revived me, I did it. It was either Ellison or one of the taxidermists (most of whom are card-carrying spastics) in the production staff. On that script I did 17 separate and individual rewrites 17. Count ’em 17. And after I was off the script, there were eight more.

  Inevitably, when I saw a “rough cut” of the show, before it was scheduled for network airing, I invoked the clause of the Writers’ Guild contract with the Producers Guild to have a pseudonym put on the segment. It was the first flight of “Cordwainer Bird.”

  It went on the air. It was a ghastly show. I did not call my relatives in Ohio and suggest they watch it. But they will put it into syndication one day soon, and the damned thing will return on Channel 5 every few months to haunt me. And how do I cop out for it?

  Because at that point—so few months after I’d arrived in Hollywood—I realized one of the inescapable facts of life: the writer in television is little more than chattel.

  S/he writes the script, and from that point on s/he not only has no control of it, s/he is considered a nuisance, someone to be circumvented, someone to flummox, to shunt into a closet, where s/he waits, purring mechanically, till the next occasion for corrupt services arises. And when the segment is aired—having been rewritten and re-rewritten by an endless succession of “creative typists” (as Bernard Wolfe refers to the script doctors)—it has had leached out of it any vestige of originality or individuality the author-of-record brought to it. It has been reduced to the lowest possible common denominator. It is fit fare for the American Viewing Public—according to the network and ad agency analysts, whose studies of all of us out here in Viewersville invariably come up with an I.Q. level somewhere south of cretinous.

  And when the segment is aired, and panned, the writer is the first one to receive the judo chop. “Dreary script,” the Hollywood Reporter intones. “Hack writing,” Daily Variety opines. “Dreck!” says Marya Mannes; “Shit!” says Jack O’Brian;
“Sententious fustion tinged with sesquipedalianism,” says Cleveland Amory, but what the hell does he know.

  So to whom do you appeal? Whom do you assault? How do you explain? The mark of Cain is upon you, and depending on where you worked last, that takes the shape of a giant eye, an ugly peacock or the first three letters of the alphabet.

  But crying the blues is the easiest part of it. The damage it does to individual writers, turning them into shambling no-talents fit only to write the same sight-gags again and again for situation comedies no more demanding than a good bowel movement…the persistent debasement of what might have once been a genuine art-form, but is now little more than a pimp for consumer goods…the perpetuation of false images and outright lies as a view of our times, thus furthering a kind of societal schizophrenia…the renunciation of any responsibility to the millions of Americans who lend the use of their airwaves…these are the greater crimes. Crimes we are now only beginning to realize ‘have been committed. For all around us we are beginning to see the effects of these depredations: entire generations of teen-agers surfeited with the phoniness of television’s picture of their world…a world that does not jibe with what they walk though daily; the jackleg yellow journalism that has slopped over into every medium of news presentation; the watering-down of values by applauding everything and plugging in a laugh-track where no applause could ever be garnered, so we no longer know what is talent and what is talentless; the totemization of the graceless and tasteless and debased so we have no respect for those things in our world that aspire to loveliness or permanence or quality for their sales alone.

  Is there an explanation for it? The explanation is complex; in its coils and convolutions lie the reasons why television is so banal; why the producers, advertisers, studios, networks and second-guessers feel they must appeal to the monkey mentality.

  To follow the reasoning from inception to final airing on your television set is very much like unscrambling the Laocoonian serpent, or swallowing your own tail. It is like the famous William Tenn short story about the man who tries to find out who is really at the top of the power structure of his corrupt and regimented society. He rises up and up through the layers of power, finding the instructions always coming down from above. And when he gets to the top, he finds himself back at the bottom, for the society is not being run by one strongman at the apex of the pyramid, but by himself. So it is with television. The corruption is so widespread, such a malignant infection, that no one in the entire maze of network memos and fear is free of the taint. Unravel the serpent, all right, let’s try, quickly.

  Masochism is all the rage this season.

  The networks sit atop the heap, all fat and sloe-eyed. They have nothing to do but inveigle the dollars from the wallets of a thousand assorted manufacturers, called sponsors. From shoe dye to hair dye, from cigarettes to baby bottles, from Mustangs to Modess they have to con the sponsors out of their bucks. And that means—supposedly—they have to present them with the most sparkling choices of new shows on which to present their goods. The big full/living/color bazaar, the marketplace, the display window. You would suppose this would put the sponsors in the catbird seat, but somehow, inexplicably, it doesn’t work out that way. The networks con and flummox the sponsors into believing they know what the public wants. (That this is not only untrue, but insulting, finds verification in any one of the hundred pronunciamentos by network heads, conveying the message that the Viewer is a schmuck and will take whatever is thrown at him. Quality, they insist, is what people “want,” what they tune in to watch, what gets the numbers. A self-fulfilling prophecy. Like something becoming fact merely because it’s in print. Put it on TV and it must be good—after all, it is on TV, isn’t it?) And with rare exceptions—such as the Xerox Corporation—the sponsor takes what he’s offered.

  So the networks predicate their operation not on service, but on profit. It isn’t merely enough to serve the public by the manipulation of our airwaves, loaned to them for our pleasure, and to make a decent profit. Hell no, it has to be ten million more dollars profit per season than its nearest competitor.

  And when you run a shop that big, on those terms, there’s only one way to fly: the operable word is safe.

  You play it safe all the way. You don’t present new and daring ideas, because new and daring ideas generally tend to bug the Establishment, the folks out there in the Great American Heartland who want laissez-faire and status quo. You don’t shake them up. If you shake them up, they won’t buy all that nice pimple-remover and foamy beer. So you surfeit them with the most obvious, least demanding fare, that which will lull them and deaden them and turn their eyeballs into replicas of Little Orphan Annie’s. Blank. The networks call it “least resistance programming.”

  To this end, the nets have their Continuity Departments, which send down several hundred thousand tons of interoffice memos yearly, chiefly concerned with not shaking up the scene. It is a pre-sell of fear that eliminates most of the honesty and originality before the scripts are even written because it is pre-censoring that occurs in the minds of the writers who will be going in on story-conferences with the producers, trying to get assignments.

  They know they won’t be able to explore any situations that smack of real life, so why should they expend effort and time and possible money in those directions. Have they done Lucy on a trampoline? No? Well, how’s that for a story idea? Great. Let’s do it. You’ve got an assignment.

  It is the Orwellian police-state prethink that prevents a writer from using as common a word as lunatic in his script. I have seen network communiques to the effect that such a word must not appear in a script, for fear of offending someone. (Offending whom? The nuts in the asylums?)

  The fear extends all down through the rickety structure. And the fear is implemented by the “ratings.” The Nielsen is God. A totally specious and regularly fallible system (though in all fairness it is the only game in town) that says “Bonanza” is better fare than “East Side, West Side” that says Andy Griffith is more stimulating to more people than “Run For Your Life” that says “The Lucy Show” is infinitely better than “The Chrysler Theater.” When was the last time you judged peaches and pears against rubber tires and aardvark hides?

  In any other line of work it would be ludicrous, but year in and year out billion-dollar operations like ABC, NBC and CBS predicate their schedules on this kind of lunacy. They compare comedy with drama, musicals with informational news programs. And the idiot shows come out on top, which is why we are bobbing about in a sea awash with flotsam and jetsam like “Gilligan’s Island,” “It’s About Time,” “Petticoat Junction,” “Green Acres,” “A Family Affair” and “Flipper.” (These would be acceptable, as relief, if we had a proportionately large number of serious dramatic or anthology shows, but with the demise of “The Chrysler Theater”—which was never really that controversial for openers—there is now a total absence of such shows.)

  Because of the scramble for ratings, the networks keep the screws on the Network Liaison Men. These are a species of scurrying, furry creatures whose specific functions even they cannot name. They are memo-writers, nit-pickers, company finks, overseers, and general all-around nuhdges. They make sure the next level down, the Producers and Executive Producers make their shooting schedules with material that won’t unnerve anyone.

  These schedules are predicated on the old saw that “the show must go on.” God forbid anyone should come in late on a shooting schedule, or ask how Humanity’s progress would be slowed or retarded if the show didn’t go on!

  (It suddenly dawned on me, one day earlier this year, when I was close to exhaustion from having written a “Man From U.N.C.L.E.” around the clock for a week, in order to meet a deadline for shooting, that it was all a shuck! Look at it this way: say I don’t get my script in on time…say the worst thing imaginable happens…they miss their shooting date…the show doesn’t get filmed in six days…they’re late in dubbing and editing and scoring…the worst t
hing that would happen is that next Friday night, at 8:30 Pacific Standard Time, you would turn on your set and get one hour of recorded organ music. This is not what I would call putting a serious blockage in the aorta of Western Civilization.)

  But to the terrified bunny rabbits in the studios and at the networks, this is a far greater tragedy than the assassination of Kennedy. Better the entire city of Des Moines should sink beneath the waves than that The Great Wad should click on its set and not be able to get its dose of pap, thus filling the Wad with sufficient feelings of gratitude so it will plunge out through lath and plaster in search of a living bra or something to clear its eight dribbling sinus cavities.

  As a result of this omnipresent state of panic, and pushpushpush, the writer is compelled to write it quick, not good. “We don’t want it brilliant, we want it Thursday,” is the dictum so many TV writers live by.

  And when they finally hand it in, what do they get: post-scripting mayhem that makes the Sharpesville Massacre look like the Mad Tea Party. Script sabotage by men and women who would never think of telling a plumber how to thread the pipes, or a stonemason how to lay the bricks, but who feel they are competent enough to tell a writer—ostensibly an expert, a craftsman, an artist with a personal vision—how to tell the story. And when, in good conscience, the writer balks…they do it themselves. Clowns who are barely literate, men and women who have had training as advertising executives or sales personnel or traffic control chiefs…these fools have the audacity to tinker with creative efforts by artists whose pencil sharpeners they are not fit to tote.