With I, Robot a possibility for inclusion on the Nebula final ballot, the time is right to raise the question again: Why is screen writing not treated with equal dignity by SFWA?
Chances of its winning are infinitesimal, but I am, at this moment, inordinately proud to have a work in the scenario form even vying for a slot as Best Novel. It heartens my brother and sister writers in this genre who move between the two mediums. It seems there will always be those so limited in their perception of what is "appropriate" that the screenplay will be pooh-pooh'd—of the many letters received by the sf magazine that published I, Robot recently, there were the expected few that came from readers who said, "What is this? I don't know how to read it," or "Why did you waste space on a script . . . it was good, but it just ain't like what you usually publish," and one can feel little more than sadness at readers who wear blinders—but movies are the popular medium in which outstanding work can be done (don't get me onto tv, please!), and it's twenty-five years past time that SFWA should be rewarding that excellence of craft seen by many more millions all over the world than ever read one of our short stories.
Which is not to say that working in Hollywood is free of angst or heartbreak or time-waste or horror. Probably no less of any of that than one finds in any industry. And heaven knows I've written about those horrors and inequities at tedious length in a hundred different forums. And may again, here in these pages. But I am not suggesting that every good writer of a page of prose chuck it all in New Jersey and rush to knock on doors at Universal. I am suggesting that careful, imaginative, worthy work is being done by many of SFWA's writer-members in this dazzlingly inventive form, and it's time those who sneer at film writing because of their own fears and limited abilities be countered by an equally vocal segment of the writing community raised in a later time that acknowledges the importance and seriousness of motion pictures as Art.
So, because I'm nuts about these snippets intended for "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," a film that was never made, and to get the dialogue going, I offer examples of script.
I talk a great deal about the script in these columns. I quote from Ring Lardner, Jr., who said: "No good film was ever made from a poor script." And I try to convince those of you who "can't read this script stuff" and those of you who, like me, love movies, that without first the word, the directors and actors would stand there with their fingers up their noses. This, as palliative to the endless interviews with arrogant thespians who tell the Rex Reeds and Mary Harts of the world how they "rewrote the dialogue" right there on the set, the day they began to roll the cameras.
I have digressed wildly, for purpose, but at last, in three quick scenes, I offer you some direct evidence of where the vision comes from that results finally in a motion picture. It comes from the writer. And the better the writers available to know-nothing producers, the better will be the films we see, the movies I review here. In these three snippets the eye of the writer becomes the vision of the scenarist. They're easy to read. Just let the inner eye see what the words tell you to see. Read and close your eyes and roll the cameras in your head. This isn't work, it's a paid vacation.
And no matter what those men and women who yell Action! try to con you into believing, they are afoot in the desert without the art and craft of the writer.
THE WHIMPER OF WHIPPED DOGS: Variation 1
FADE IN: 1 NEW YORK STREET—NIGHT
Chill and damp. The pavements look as though they're coated with fever-sweat. Fog and mist silently swirl and hang like torn lace in the air. An upper West Side sort of street with ancient light stanchions that cast dull illumination, fog-shrouded light, just enough to see vaguely, with halations around them.
CAMERA MOVES STEADILY down the street at waist height. Past withering brown-stones, battered garbage cans that are chained by their lids to iron fences, flaking stone stoops, steps leading down to basement apartments, huge plastic bags of refuse at the curbs, cars parked almost one atop another. And all of it swathed in obscuring fog. CAMERA PANS LEFT as it CONTINUES MOVE IN and we see down a short throw of steps into a sub-street cul-de-sac entrance to an apartment. A man in shapeless clothes lies unmoving with his feet and legs aimed toward us. His head and shoulders below. Upside-down. One arm outflung. Head twisted at an unnatural angle. As though he fell backward down the stairs. Clearly dead, though we cannot see his face.
CAMERA SWINGS BACK and CONTINUES MOVING down the street with a smooth, casual movement. A woman lies dead in the gutter, face toward the curb so we cannot see her features, one arm bent up and lying on the sidewalk above her. CAMERA does not linger.
As CAMERA MOVES DOWN STREET toward the park and the river, seen vaguely through the trembling mist, we find ourselves looking for more bodies, but we cannot be certain if those two huddled shapes in the VW at the curb are dead; they are slumped forward on the dash but they might be just sleeping; that pile of rags at the mouth of the alley might be an old man with a battered hat jammed down on his dead face, but it could be just trash; and as we enter the small park abutting the drop to the Hudson River we see what could be a woman's naked arm protruding from under a bush, but it might be only a dead branch. It might be.
But we know for certain that the man sitting on the bench is dead. His head hangs back as only a head with its throat cut can hang. At that awkward angle, arms out to the sides, legs spread, body braced against the bench. CAMERA SWINGS PAST and PASSES ON to HOLD the silent river, fog rising and tumbling. Then, out on the River, lonely and desperate, we HEAR the SOUND of a tug heading for the Narrows. Once, twice, distantly. Then silence again. The city is silent.
FADE TO BLACK And FADE OUT.
THE WHIMPER OF WHIPPED DOGS: Variation 2
FADE IN:
1 RED FRAME—IN MAGMA POOL
Around the CAMERA molten lava bubbles and seethes. No sound. High contrast. CAMERA BEGINS TO RISE up through the maelstrom. It does not tilt, but RISES VERTICALLY. It reaches the surface of the magma pool, breaks the tension and we see across the leaping, spitting surface. CAMERA CONTINUES RISING through steam in the chamber above the lava. To the dendritic stone of the cavern ceiling. CAMERA PASSES THROUGH, STILL RISING
DISSOLVE THRU: 2 CAMERA RISING THRU ROCK—EFFECT
Varying levels of light and dark, indicating stratification of rock. Through iron, mica schist, diatomaceous earth, layers of roiling oil, feldspar, marble, sparkling levels of gold, diamonds, phosphates, solid granite, up and up.
DISSOLVE THRU TO: 3 CAMERA IN SOIL—EFFECT
RISING SMOOTHLY as we view it in the manner of someone in an elevator sees floor after floor dropping past. Up through rock and soil to empty spaces, through and up to hard-packed sub-soil, concrete slabbing, coils and snakes of cable, electrical conduit, pipes. Up past them through metal sheathing, into flowing water—a sewer system. CAMERA RISES to feature a metal ladder used by maintenance crews. Up to the ladder to a grating above as we
DISSOLVE THRU: 4 STREET—NIGHT
CAMERA RISES up out of the sewer grating to HOLD for a beat the silent night street of New York. SHOOT THE LENGTH of the street in fog and rain. CAMERA CONTINUES to RISE after beat; TILT CAMERA UP to feature the huge and silent monoliths of incredibly tall buildings that close in overhead.
HOLD the ominous leaning structures as the clouds tear apart for a moment and the single white eye of the Moon is seen. In the b.g. DISTANCE we HEAR the SOUND of dogs crying, as though they are being beaten. Not loud. We may not hear it at all. Then the clouds close over again, the Moon is gone, and the fog swirls in to FILL FRAME.
FRAME TO BLACK.
THE WHIMPER OF WHIPPED DOGS: Variation 3
FADE IN:
1 SHOT ACROSS WATER—NIGHT
Dark, slick water. Oily. CAMERA MOVES IN just above the softly undulating surface. An occasional silvered flash across a gentle swell, as of moonlight skimming into darkness. Fog rolls across the lens. CAMERA IN STEADILY toward a massive throw of land that rises up in b.g. We can make out nothing but the gray
shape moving towards us.
SLOW STEADY MOVE IN across the water till we perceive we are beaching on an island. Fog rolls up the naked beach. CAMERA IN to climb the beach and MOVES IN through darkness across low dunes. Now something rises up through the darkness. Tall. CAMERA KEEPS MOVING in on the shape. It is an Easter Island menhir. One of the great stone faces of antiquity. Silence.
CAMERA ANGLES SMOOTHLY AROUND the statue and goes past. Across the dead island to another head. And past to another. And another. To the largest of them. CAMERA TILTS DOWN and MOVES IN for EXTREME CLOSEUP through the roiling fog of the ashy ground.
HOLD EXTREME CLOSEUP of a bright, clean very modern knife lying in the sandy ash at the foot of the menhir. Again, a brief flash of silver light, this time across the blade—as if the moon had hurled one single beam through the clouds and the fog.
Then a drop of water strikes the knife blade. Then a drop of water dimples the sand beside it. Then another. Then it begins to rain steadily. The knife sinks slowly into the rain-soaked absorbent ash and sand, and as its haft goes under, the fog closes down, swirls, and FILLS FRAME.
CAMERA HOLDS on fog was we HEAR in the b.g. DISTANCE the SOUND of a ululating siren: an ambulance, a police car perhaps, a truck carrying people to ovens; we cannot quite place it. It recedes and SILENCE resumes.
FADE TO BLACK.
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / June 1988
INSTALLMENT 30:
In Which The LI'l White Lies Thesis (Part Two) Takes Us By The Snout And Drags Us Unwillingly Toward A Door We Fear To Open
We were talking about being lied to, and how it unhinges us. How it makes us feel used and foolish, that we were so damned anxious to believe the hype. How irrationally angry it makes us to know that no matter how wise and experienced we have become as we grew older, that adroit liars can still manipulate us by plumbing our ever-regenerating gullibility, our need to believe. (In this way, I suspect, no amount of revelation of corruption on the part of televangelists will ever free their supporters. They discover one awfulness after another about the Falwells, Swaggarts, Popoffs, Robertsons and Bakkers, and yet they fling themselves again and again into the wash of hossanahs that keeps them asea in ignorance.)
As Michel de Montaigne, the French moralist, wrote: "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know."
We were talking about the false lures thrown out by the makers of movies to convince us that trash has sidebar merit, value apart from the work itself. And I mentioned that we had been lied to as regards, among other films, the 1985 fantasy Ladyhawke. And one of you wrote insisting that I was wrong, that the film was based on some obscure medieval legends. And Faithful Reader upbraided me for mischievously shattering beliefs.
Well, I never went into detail on that matter, because I'm trying (in what now appears to be a series of three columns) to codify a thesis of gullibility and duplicity that seems to have some credibility; and I simply didn't have the time to linger. But perhaps you do need a bit more convincing.
In the September/October 1987 issue of Scannings, an information search and retrieval newsletter for librarians, we find the following Q&A exchange:
Q: On what legends was the movie "Ladyhawke" based? The story concerns lovers who are cursed. He is a wolf at night, she a hawk during the day. They assume their human forms only at opposite times.
A: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library had a press release from Warner Bros, stating, "legend dates back to the 13th century from paintings on the walls of the Mauseturm Castle in the Rhine Valley to the Loup Garou legend of France's Auvergne Forest to Rodriguez de la Fuente in Spain."
When we went to gather these legends . . . we found the Mauseturm story did not match, the loup-garou, or werewolf, story was too vague, and the only Rodriguez de la Fuente we found was a 20th century Spanish naturalist.
We wrote to scriptwriter Edward Khmara for an explanation. Here is his reply:
The story of two lovers kept apart by taking human form only at opposite times of the day was an inspiration that occurred to me while jogging on the roof of the Hollywood YMCA.
The studio contention that "Ladyhawke" is based on an old legend is, in fact, a violation of Writers Guild rules, since it denies me full rights of authorship. The Guild undertook an action against Warner Bros, on this account . . . and a small amount of money was paid as compensation . . . Warner Bros., or its publicity department, continues to circulate material restating the old legend story.
The inspiration for the character of Phillipe the Mouse was Francois Villon. His "Testament" recounts his imprisonment and mistreatment by Bishop Thibault d'Aussigny, in the dungeons of Meung. When the Dauphin, soon to be Louis XI of France, passed through Meung on the way to his coronation, he freed the prisoners, including Villon. This incident was actually used in the original story of "Ladyhawke."
So I may have been wrong about the meaning of "liver and lights," but I definitely knew what I was talking about when I used Ladyhawke as an example of how we are lied to.
Lied to, that is, in the specific sense of misrepresentation. And here, as I promised in Installment 29, we'll move on to another kind of lying, another species of misrepresentation: plagiarism.
If one elects to pursue a plagiarism suit in a court of law, one must never solicit "expert testimony" from a Renaissance or Medieval scholar, because stealing the work, ideas, manner of others, in those times, was considered nothing unusual. In fact, quite acceptable.
The modern concept of plagiarism, paradoxically, is both specific and nebulous. What is theft, and what is "coincidental simultaneous generation" of idea or ambience? What is the rapacity of producers, network development executives, main chance hustlers and all those who denigrate writers but don't know how to construct a plot themselves . . . and what is acceptable, even flattering, literary crossover, feedback, input, stimulation?
In the world of publishing, plagiarism is so rare that its occurrence startles everyone, and it makes the news section of Publishers Weekly.
(Oddly enough—given the almost encyclopedic memories of so many readers and writers and fans, guaranteeing near-instantaneous unmasking—there have been a few notable instances of book/story plagiarism in the sf/fantasy genre in recent memory. There was a guy who took Gardner F. Fox's 1964 Paperback Library novel, Escape Across the Cosmos, changed the names of the characters, and sold it to another paperback house some years later. There is considerable mythology surrounding that most flagrant case, and while I'm certain some readers will know the specifics, the best I can do is present all the data I can dredge up from imperfect memories, both actual and emblematic. Trying to get the anecdote accurately, I savaged the recollections of Charlie Brown of Locus, Silverberg, Joe Haldeman and several others, but understandably enough none of these rational gentlemen cared to depart from their creative labors to spend several hours rummaging through ancient issues of the SFWA Forum or other sources to get me the data. You've got to be kidding and Piss off, kid were the politest responses. Can't say I blame 'em; so you'll have to do with this jumble of truths and fancies intended to make the point, not to reflect what actually happened. Anyhow, one story has it that a customer came into a specialty bookshop bearing a copy of a paperback bought the day before, screaming scorched earth at the bookseller for having sold the outraged reader a novel that was exactly like one the customer had read. When the bookseller compared the new title with the Fox book, it was discovered that the theft was line-for-line. The author had copied the entire novel, merely changing the names of the characters. When the bookseller advised the publisher—some say it was Belmont, a well-known schlock operation, thus making this a classic case of poetic justice—the publisher sought out the writer and discovered he was hard at work doing the same job on an old Robert Moore Williams Ace double. When confronted with his crime, the guy is alleged to have been utterly bewildered. "I didn't do anything wrong," he's reported to have said. "Isn't this the way all books are written?"
If that part isn't whole cloth, then it was a case of doltish behavior raised to the nth power. But other versions of the yarn have it that the guy also sold the Fox novel a second time, to the hardcover publisher Thomas Nelson, having changed the names again. And when they went looking for the clown, he'd cashed the check and split. Either way, it doesn't speak well to the familiarity-with-genre of the editors involved. Usually, this kind of thing is the result of uncomplicated amateurism, a lack of commonsense, naïveté almost impossible to conceive if one has even a passing familiarity with writing and publishing. Impossible for us to believe, yet far more common than one might suspect. But once in a while the plagiarism comes from a professional who does know better, who does the deed fully cognizant of what s/he is pulling off. In 1974 a well-known fantasy author—whose identity, though known to me, has never been publicly revealed, nor will I do so now—masquerading as "Terry Dixon," supposedly a young black male writer, copped the famous Anatole France short story, "The Procurator of Judrea," rewrote it as "The Prophet of Zorayne," and passed it off for sale to Roger Elwood for a Trident Press/Pocket Books anthology. A private detective named Sam Bluth was hired to track down the culprit, and the writer—neither young nor black—was brought to book. A rare, bizarre case.)
Harlan Ellison's Watching Page 52