And he’d be right.
The scene with the sister, Grace, was so truncated that at the point where Zal reveals for the first time that her sister Hallie is using, and Grace has a heart clutch of anguish, the nonvillains who did the cutting decided it wasn’t important. And so we see a total stranger tell this woman her sister is on speed, as a matter of course, and the sister doesn’t even pause a beat in the mixing of her banana bread. It was illogical, and crippling to the scene. I was trying to say that, frequently, those closest to someone hurting from drugs are totally unaware of the addiction. I thought it an important and relevant point. Deleted, it makes the sister seem imbecilic and heartless.
For the record, I found that entire scene slow and badly acted. Awkward and stagy.
The watch. You recall Zalman hocked his watch—among other things—to get up the bail money. In the show, Cobb suddenly has the watch and gives it back to Zal. In the script Zal is amazed Cobb has it and asks him where he got it. Cobb says (or was supposed to say), the kid you sold it to came in this morning looking for you, I bought it back, you owe me twenty bucks. Zal starts to leave, and Cobb stops him saying, “He was looking for you because you stiffed him. The watch doesn’t run.”
Another small touch omitted, and not in itself important to the show, but just one more touch of characterization dropped in the rush to make the show fit and squeeze into time limits. Which would be valid if they hadn’t run short and been too lazy to edit properly, filling in those deletions with footage that mattered instead of taking the easy way out and filling up about four minutes with drive-through stock footage of the NLO bus.
In the macramé scene they managed to cast a girl with no discernible talent, who butchered every line she spoke. They also managed to cut all references to the landlord. We talked about that some weeks ago. They thought it was anti-Semitic, and though I advised them that millions of Catholics, trade unionists, gypsies, and Freemasons were also victims of Hitler’s death camps—and even rewrote the scene specifically to avoid any Jewish references—they still cut it all. Thereby making the relationship between the girl and the attorney (Pat in the original version, Chris Blake in the revised version) invalid. Additionally, they went to great (?ha!) expense to get macramé equipment and extras who knew how to do the knot-tying, and then managed to delete any explanation of what they were up to. The scene was weak and semipointless. Phil Clark as Chris struggled mightily with the scene—even as Zal struggled with most of his—but the casting was so inept and the script had been butchered so thoroughly, it was hopeless.
Whole scenes establishing rapport between Cobb and Zalman were dropped. In other scenes Cobb deluded himself (and everyone else) into believing a look or a line would suffice for a full speech. More the fools they.
When Judy Pace and Zalman finally find a link to Hallie, a black kid named Obie Stover, the logic of the scene is blown when Hallie’s boyfriend, Joe Bob, comes on the scene. I specifically gave clues that Joe Bob had a heavy Southern accent so that when he calls out to Obie, and Obie yells, “Get outta here! Narks!” we will know it’s Joe Bob. Instead, the casting was so sloppy they couldn’t get anyone in the city of Los Angeles with a Southern accent, and Obie had to yell out, “Joe Bob, get outta here, narks!” Is there one among you who thinks it logical that a dealer would yell out the name of a client in front of two suspected cops?
Then the chase. I wrote it for about thirty seconds, just enough to lapse over an act break. But by ham-handed cutting, they wound up with the chase all in one act, and it looked like a rerun of The Immortal or The Mod Squad. Up one alley and down another, around and around, over lumber and up ladders. Bullshit! They wasted precious minutes that could have been spent in deepening character, instead of throwing that archaic chase into the story. It was a sop to the outmoded thinking of studios that believe their audiences won’t sit still if you don’t have ACTION!
Finally, Zalman finds Hallie. And here the show really crumbles to dust. She is supposed to try and get away through a back window. Paramount was too chintzy to use a second set, and they have Zal and Judy suddenly running up a stairway and catching Hallie as she dashes for a window. That’s bad enough, but additionally some asshole inserted a shot of an apartment bell with the name HALLIE BENDA in it. Now you tell me, friends, if you were on the dodge, would you have your name on the door?
And then we have the payoff scene in which Zal has to make the decision to send Hallie back to the slammer, for her own good. The scene was written for bittersweet memory and the moment of growing up, and quiet madness. Instead, Miss Strasberg opted for more rug-chewing. She thrashed and flailed and screamed and it came out like a 1940 Warner Bros. gangster film…“Duke! Don’t send me back, Duke! Please, Duke, I love you, Duke! We can go away, Duke! I’ll do anything you want, Duke! I’ll be your slave, Duke! Please, please, PLEEEEEEZE, DUKE!”
Bullshit!
I won’t even go into specifics about the tag after the final act. That was where I wanted to say something meaningful about dope, about how we lie to kids when we tell them via billboards and slick paper ads and tv that there is a chemical answer to any problem from athlete’s foot to napalming Vietnamese babies. It was very probably a sententious and pompous series of speeches I’d written for Cobb and King, but it was the point of the show, the reason I wrote the fucking mess. But Mr. Cobb apparently couldn’t bring himself to take a solid position. He couldn’t even speak speeches rewritten for him five times (according to the ABC press release). He could not let those words come out of his mouth. He had to ameliorate by saying, “Judge Knight and I have discussed this, and she thinks kids today can’t handle responsibility, so they use drugs.”
I’m not allowed to talk about Mr. Cobb any further than that, at risk of Jud’s thinking me a betrayer; all I’ll say is that my dreams of working with the man who created Willy Loman were hideously dashed.
As were my dreams that something warm and human could be slipped past the chippers. I was a fool, as I’ve said many times in these two columns. I’m not playing martyr, and I really don’t like self-flagellation. But it now becomes so clear that for two and a half years writing these columns I’ve been deluded and wholly foolish. I’ve lied to you consistently, and there is no possible way you can forgive me for it, so I won’t ask.
I have three more columns to write after this one, but let’s face it, gang, they’re anticlimax. This is where it all ends.
For Zalman I feel sympathy. He worked as hard as he could to make the series and this show swing. For Jim McAdams I feel pity. He is like a man bound and gagged and forced to watch his family burned to death before his eyes. For Jud Taylor I feel sadness. He has talent, and he’ll never be able to demonstrate it on television. For Matthew Rapf I feel charity. He was beaten and broken by the network, the studio, and by Mr. Cobb.
For the gentleman at Paramount who got me blacklisted off that job, for Mr. Cobb, for the actors and actresses in the show who were bad, for the men who are responsible for the wretched editing of my show, and for all the thieves who stole the money that might have made the time to do the show properly…to all of you I wish the worst. I wish nameless and terrible dreammonsters that will haunt you till you die.
And when that great Trendex in the sky finally hands down the ratings, I hope to god that god and all His high-level executives cancel you in midseason.
Bad cess to the lot of you. For my part, you can take your tv and roll it tightly and insert it forcibly.
I wish I were a drinking man.
100: 26 MARCH 71
I want to talk about the Man Trap show, a syndicated talk/panel series filmed in the studios of CHAN-TV, Vancouver, British Columbia. I spent a weekend up there recently, put in a guest appearance (one of my rare p.a.’s), and had a helluva good time on the show, and thought you might like to share another of my weird experiences out in The Quivering Universe.
But before I get to Vancouver, I have to start with the earthquake.
Jesus
, by now you must know what a circumlocutious bastard I am.
February 9 at 5:59 a.m. I was asleep in my bed as were most of you in Los Angeles. At 5:59:31 the earth gave a burp and my bed filled up with house guests, naked ladies, and my dog Ahbhu. When I tell my friends I was not frightened, they get furious with me. Apparently there is something infuriating about a man who doesn’t share the universal terror at being helpless atop the trembling earth. But that is the truth. Sorry.
(In point of fact, the only danger I was in came from Ahbhu. The goddamn animal leaped onto the bed and wrapped all four paws around my neck. I might well have been the only earthquake victim to die by animal strangulation, had not one of the naked ladies pried him off me.)
That was 6:00 a.m. At 2:30 p.m. I attended a preview screening of The Andromeda Strain, what I thought was a very good translation of the Michael Crichton novel. It concerns itself with a planetary debacle.
Later that night men returned from the moon, and when it got dark we had a total eclipse of the lunar orb.
All in all, it was a cosmically heavy day for me.
Made no lighter in weight by the appearance at that screening of Jack Margolis.
Some of you may have heard of Jack.
In a lifetime of action, danger, adventure, and acquaintance with blatantly freaky people, I assure you I have met none freakier than Jack Margolis.
Describing Jack is akin to falling down a rabbit hole and trying to give a play-by-play of the Caucus Race featuring the Duck, the Dodo, the Lory, and the Eaglet. He is enormously tall. (Not as tall as Michael Crichton, who is something like seven feet and has to stoop to come through doorways, but tall, nonetheless. Of course, when one is 5'5", everyone looks tall.) His hair looks like one of those mad experiments by Lugosi out of a 1930 horror flick, where a lab full of Van de Graaff generators and bus bars has managed to accomplish the growing of hair on a basketball. Jack is very hairy.
Very hairy. Very sorry.
(That was a line out of Kismet, and has nothing to do with anything, but since I’m in the last five weeks of this column I feel little in the way of restitution can be demanded of me if I get somewhat Joycean.)
Jack is one of those people, for true or not, whom one feels has “underground connections.” If you want hash, a bail bondsman, an abortionist, a nude model, a hit man, a smuggler, a Chinese hunchback dwarf, a system of ripping off Bell Tel, a hot car, a kangaroo with a broken tail, a cure for rinderpest, a fast loan, a mail drop for Judge Crater, a long-out-of-print bit of pornography, or a Corvette from the mothball fleet…Jack Margolis is the first man one calls. He has written books extolling the merits of grass and orgies, he has long conducted a radio program of wry witticisms and bad rock, he is a dabbler in films, a writer for Laugh-In, and a man with the single-most-
reprehensible attitude toward women of any living human being, save possibly Mort Sahl.
I find it difficult to call Jack “my friend.” I’m not sure Jack has any friends, only allies. Suffice it to say, we are not at the moment actively engaged in cutting each other’s throat. Though this column may sharply alter the status quo.
Anyhow, Jack and I sat together during The Andromeda Strain screening, and (as a man who loathsomely gibbers throughout a film) he asked me, “Have you been up to Vancouver to do the Man Trap show?”
I shook my head no, watching Kate Reid go into an epileptic trance on the screen.
“It’s a syndicated show Al Hamel worked up with Dick Clark Productions. They fly you up to Vancouver and put you up at the Bay Shore Inn and treat you like a king and then you do this half-hour show where they take a male guest and throw him in with three chicks with sharp teeth who attack his position on various subjects.”
Aside from his reference to women as “chicks,” a vestigial chauvinist effrontery used by many lads in show biz (including Mr. Hamel), the recitation caught my fancy. After the film I told Jack it sounded sensational, and he very graciously offered to call the associate producer, Hank Saroyan, to suggest me as a possible guest. Thereby making me feel like a shit for denigrating this fine, decent, and uplifted human being in any way.
I mean, how can you put down a man who invites you to a 200-person orgy?
The next day, I received a call from Mr. Saroyan, who quizzed me on my positions re women. After naming the 174 basic positions I take on women (six of which are unnatural), he said I sounded just peachykeen and if I’d send him a bio and photo he’d put the machinery in motion to get me to Vancouver, adding the show paid minimum—which is two hundred bucks—and I had to take care of my own food.
That struck me as a trifle odd. How much, I wondered, can a person eat in Vancouver over a weekend? The more I thought about it, the more ominous it seemed. Not for a moment did I consider his remark to be grounded in chintziness; if one can’t believe in the essential honesty and wonderfulness of Dick Clark, for god’s sake, whom can one believe in?
I filed the food remark away in the back of my mind. But I vowed to take along a thermos of water and a packet of sunflower seeds. Perhaps Saroyan was trying to warn me away from all that foreign food and water. Dysentery in Vancouver? My mind reeled.
Saroyan (who is, quite incidentally, a nephew of William Saroyan, may his name be spoken with joy forever) also noted that the lady panelists I’d be facing included suchlike as Nina Foch, Meredith MacRae, Margot Kidder and/or Suzanne Somers. Nina I knew, from a Burke’s Law I’d written some years ago, in which she played a murderess. Miss Foch’s credentials as an intellectual heavyweight were solid with me, and I assumed if the balance of the panel was on her level it would be a dynamite encounter.
On Saturday, February 20, I flew up to Vancouver on Non-Skeddo Airlines in the company of Bob Einstein—another Laugh-In writer whom you may remember as Officer Judy from the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.
He is deranged. I will say no more about Einstein, save that he is not a nephew to Albert.
A moment’s digression (as if this were the first) about Vancouver, however.
It is unbelievably lovely. The city itself is a city like all cities, but from the window of my room at the Bay Shore Inn, I looked out across water as blue as a sacred scarab from a Pharaoh’s tomb. Fishing boats moored like old men taking the sun. Great swooping gulls that dove to fold in atop masts and rode the wind currents to my balcony where they observed me with detached bemusement. Great stands of virgin timber rising straight up to snowy mountaintops where the sun catches the ice crystals in Omar Khayyám’s “noose of light” and sends it back shattering against the eyes. Clear. So clear you can see all the way up Queen Charlotte Strait to the Pacific, or so it seems. One can turn just so and see the world the way it was before concrete and neon and Styrofoam; and a gladness jumps up in the heart. Perhaps for this reason Vancouver seems a happy city. Random people on street corners smile for no discernible reason. A movie marquee proclaims LITTLE BIG MAN starring CHIEF DAN GEORGE with DUSTIN HOFFMAN, and one understands small prides. The candy bars are nastier than American brands, but the wrappers are more polite. Dining is more leisurely than in Los Angeles. It might be possible to go to Vancouver for a long while and write good books there. The air, dear god, the sharp minty bright air!
A girl with her hair in braids and her body hidden inside a parka came down off one of those mountains, through the trees, and brought back the smell of the innocent earth, and she brought it into one of the rooms of the Bay Shore Inn, and smiled at me, and I gave her a glass of cola, and later that night we went to dinner.
Vancouver was a splendid place to be that weekend.
The next day I was taken out to the suburb of Burnaby to film Man Trap.
I am of a certain ambivalence about the concept of the show. It seems, at moments, to be merely a distaff-oriented Joe Pyne Show (may his name be spoken with distaste forever). The concept—pushed hard by the production personnel—is that a “good” show can only emerge from a vitriolic and bitchy confrontation between a male and females. To this end m
uch of the a priori information fed the lady panelists is mock-up hype, misinterpreted by Mr. Saroyan and the show’s producer, Bill Lee. I’ll give you a f’rinstance:
Over the phone, and in an office interview, I made it abundantly clear that I like women, I like what they are and the way they think…most of the time. I am flat out in favor of Women’s Liberation and what it’s trying to do for all women, even those who choose to be galley slaves. A point of contention that might spark some discussion, I’d said, was my feeling that in the area of The War, women were hypocritical. That, apart from gold star mothers—those ghouls who send their sons out with the admonition to come back with their shields or dead on them—who then receive their children back in plastic bags and proudly hang that hideous gold star in their living-room windows, feeling perhaps they have struck an equitable trade—that aside from such Martha Mitchell monsters, women are the only group that has an effective weapon to stop The War…and all wars.
Lysistrata is the answer, of course.
For ten thousand years men have waged wars. Obviously we are either unwilling or incapable of putting an end to the filthy habit. We are helpless, and women are not. If they said, simply, “If you want to fight, you don’t get to fuck,” war would cease in fifteen minutes. Withholding their “favors” would be the most effective deterrent to war since the invention of gunpowder.
(Don’t point out to me this is implausible. I know it. I am postulating a nobility on the part of all women that all men do not possess. Nonetheless, I am a Utopian and I like to let such wild schemes scamper through my head. I was expecting the ladies to point it out on the show, and thence would have begun the discussion.)
This mildly interesting conversational gambit was warped and brutalized into a cue card that said (I’m remembering, not quoting verbatim), “Mr. Ellison has some gripes against women. He thinks they’re hypocrites and responsible for most of what’s wrong with the world today, including the war in Southeast Asia.”
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