The Glass Teat - essays of opinion on the subject of television

by Harlan Ellison

  The segment proceeded, and in fifteen brief minutes it made a case against the current outmoded welfare apparat and for the first time—that I know of—on television, told the mass of the American viewing public that those two million black faces wanted off the dole, wanted to regain their dignity, and a semblance of joyous living.

  Then, from abject, pesk-crawling poverty, 60 Minutes winged down to Palm Beach for fifteen minutes of examination of the Beautiful People. Palm Beach, where at times during “the season” there are more millionaires per square inch than anywhere else in the world.

  Oh, it was a chi-chi segment all right.

  Mrs. Woolworth-Birdseed plays a fine game of tennis. You really must play tennis on her courts to be “in” in Palm Beach. She had the begonias dyed to match the color of the swimming pool.

  Mrs. Thorton-Twitchell plays tennis wearing a necklace. On occasion she scrubs her own floors, and on Wednesday afternoons she washes her porcelain birds.

  One never goes anywhere in Palm Beach in a Rolls Royce that is filled. Two or three is the most the car should carry. If you have four or more, you take two Rolls’s and go in a caravan.

  Mrs. Grubber’s party cost $50,000 but it was a tame evening for her. She only wore the ruby earrings, no necklace, bracelet or brooch.

  And on ... and on ... and hideously on....

  Fat bellies, wattled necks, liver spots from eating too well, too much, too often. Aging owners of the American Dream. The titled. The privileged. With their WASP clubs that don’t admit Jews, and their Jewish clubs that discourage the goyim. Maintaining a level of society steeped in prejudice, conspicuous waste, arrogance, phony charity to assuage guilt, and insulating themselves from reality by erecting a wall of bland indifference to that black woman in Baltimore.

  The parallel, the Aesop moral of the show, could not be ignored. 60 Minutes did not need to editorialize verbally. By the chockablocking of the two extremes, they stated the case for Life in Our Times with pellucid verve.

  Well, we are by no means the ghetto-trapped black woman...nor are we Mrs. Asshole-Moneyswine with her dyed blue begonias. But here we sit in a nation that will not tax the giant corporations as they should be, will not tax the Church as it should be, will not tax organized crime as it should be, will not tax the oil companies as they should be ... but has the audacity to surtax us again and again to pay for the war that will only help to enhance the fortynes of the Palm Beach habitues.

  Here we sit, with Aesop the TV telling us we are certainly boobs. Telling us the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. And maybe worst of all, the mass of us, neither extremely rich nor extremely poor, but in the middle, will get more and more of our world chipped away from us . . . whether we like it or not.

  It makes one wonder: at what point does the boob despise himself enough to take up the club and smash to jelly the heads of those who exploit him?

  * * * *

  25: 18 APRIL 69

  For those of you out there who make a fetish of jotting down annual high and low tide figures, who fill in every box on a baseball scorecard, who save old newspapers and knot up twittles of twine till you have a giant ball—in short, for those of you who pay close attention to trivial matters—I am back from two weeks in Brazil and New York. For the rest of you, who could care less, the only benefit you will derive from my journey is a revelation of what TV is like in Rio de Janeiro, under the hand of a military dictator, with eighty per cent of the population stone illiterate. But that comes next week, or the week after, as soon as one of my spies back in Rio manages to smuggle out some statistics to me. And if you think I’m kidding about smuggling the information out, you should be in Rio at seven o’clock every night, when every station simultaneously broadcasts the same news, word-for-word, videotaped by the same announcer.

  It suddenly makes you very warm and cuddly feeling about the good old US of A, despite all the nonsense going down. I can suddenly dig where all the superpatriots are at, when they say “America: Love it or Leave it.” Shit, Jack, comes to one or the other, I’ll love the ass off it ... the coffee in Brazil can kill you!

  But it isn’t Brazil about which I choose to ramble this time. It is about the snake pit that was waiting for me when I got back to Los Angeles.

  If you recall, in the last exciting chapter of “Harlan Ellison, Boy Scriptwriter,” our hero had decided not to do his Name Of The Game script on student dissent because every Manny, Moe and Jack was doing the subject to death (there was another one on Mod Squad last week). Our intrepid hero, committed to integrity and T*R*U*T*H, had somewhichway flummoxed his producer, George Eckstein, into allowing him to write the script on pornography. Our Hero, you recall, had started out in deadly fashion by titling his epic Smut.

  (One sure way of avoiding being bought-out by the Establishment is by setting a price they can’t possibly meet.)

  But, onward.

  Our Hero thereafter sat down and wrote a splendid 24 page “treatment” of the script as he intended to develop it. As we all know, a script assignment for TV is divided into three parts: treatment, first draft, final draft. You can be “cut off” after the treatment, meaning they pay you only for what you have already written, and the assignment is dead. (There are two variations on the “cut off.” In the first mode, they pay you x amount of dollars and they own the treatment or story idea. In the second manner, they pay you less money and you own the treatment; the latter method is more advantageous if it’s the kind of idea you can rewrite and sell to another show, but let’s face it, how many shows are there on the air with little people on a planet of giants? You getting the picture, troops?)

  If the treatment passes muster with the producer, the studio and the network schlepps, then you are given a “go-ahead” (oh! how they do use the English language!) and from that point on, win or lose, class or shit, you cannot be taken off the assignment. Until it’s over, at which point they start rewriting you, but that’s another horror story.

  Okay, so I wrote the treatment, a contemporary action-adventure story loosely paralleling a Jack-the-Ripper theme, the main point of which was that Dan Farrell (played by Robert Stack), as editor of Crime Magazine, is trying once and for all to establish a direct casual link between crime and reading pornography. You know, that old saw about girlie magazines warping the minds of kids so they go on and rape their school teachers, or drag nine-year-old birds into the coal bins of church basements. You know.

  (N.B. Only a real sickie, like the wizards who make these suggestions, could think there’d be any jollies in screwing a nine-year-old. You ever see the figure on a nine-year-old? Twelve-year-old, okay, that’s a different matter ... but nine? Chickens?)

  In the writing, I had to face the inescapable problem that Mr. Stack is a highly conservative gentleman, and he would never give script approval to a show in which he came out for smut and filth. So I had to pose an intellectual problem, and let the answer be revealed to Stack as he went along. It was a tightrope act, I’ll grant you, but because of the purity of my desire and the clean hands & composure which I brought to the project, I was able to accomplish this well-nigh-impossible feat of legerdemain.

  Even George Eckstein was amazed.

  I handed in the treatment before I left for Rio, and though George had some reservations about the number of hideous, ghastly, brutal murders committed in the segment (3), he was delighted with the manner in which I’d managed to make a case both pro and con for pornography. That is, I’d made a pro case for good pornography, such as the Alexander Trocchi and Hank Stine and Philip Jose Farmer novels being published by Brian Kirby out at Essex House, but had bummed the crotch magazines whose Brobdingnagian photos of moist pudenda are about as sexy as a closeup of Ausable Chasm guaranteed to turn-off all but righteous acne-fetishists.

  When I returned, I found George Eckstein whimpering beneath his desk at Universal Studios. The man was a distant echo of his former magnificence. He needed eight scripts to shoot for next season, had had twelve in
the works when I’d left, and now had six that the networks had thumbed-down.

  He was incapable of speech. His secretary and I helped him into the sofa, put a cold compress on his furrowed brow, and I went off around Universal to find out what had happened.

  The answer was quick in coming. Senator John O. Pastore (D., R.I.) had happened.

  All five foot four of him had happened to television. This latter-day Fredric Wertham had clouded up and rained all over TV. “Violence, smut, degradation!” he had shouted, in a voice acknowledged to be the loudest (by decibel-count) in the Senate.

  And with their usual fortitude, the network mufti had stood their ground for artistic integrity and the merits of realism in television drama, and had started killing scripts left and right.

  I discovered that one script in which there was no violence had been strangled a-borning because there was a suicide in it, and near the end someone calls a girl who has slept with countless hordes of men a “nymphomaniac.” The word come from upstairs that if there was to be a suicide, it had to be an unsuccessful one, and that the word nymphomaniac could not be used. This was one of the more rational decisions. The others were straight out of chicken-licken the sky is falling.

  Naturally, Eckstein had not even submitted my treatment, in which three luscious girls are done away with. By a deranged killer with a length of silk rope. Oh boy! Blood! Naked thighs! Insane chuckling in the dark!

  When Eckstein had recovered somewhat, we talked over the possibilities of salvaging what had been written, and at last report George was going to propose to the network Gods that Our Hero rewrite the treatment to examine how and why pretty young girls wind up in stag movies.

  For those of you who have been following this diary of a script in The Glass Teat, you will perceive that much ground has been covered since the assignment was first given. Yet no progress has been made.

  I will keep you advised as this black comedy proceeds.

  In the meantime, don’t give up hope; the Kid has sold a series to NBC (in conjunction with his partner, Paramount) which the network seems to be exceedingly high on. I am at present scripting the pilot segment. It is a one-hour dramatic science fiction idea called Man Without Time and has considerable clout built into it. If the Gods be kind, in addition to the staggeringly obscene amounts of money I’ve made and can make from this series (I own 15%), we may be able to get something rewarding before your now-bleary eyes. I’ll keep reporting on this one, too.

  Oh, and by the way, as a public service announcement, they’ve pretty well established that color TV sets give off harmful radiations, so if you don’t want your kids coming up with warped chromosomes or their kids being born with three heads, I suggest you not sit up close to the color box, and keep the viewing to a minimum.

  Which, considering the clams currently being hacked onto the screen, shouldn’t be too hard to manage.

  * * * *

  26: 25 APRIL 69

  If we can forget about white Stetsons for a while, maybe we should talk about The Hero. The Good Guy. What brings me to an examination of the phenomenon of The Hero is a movie-for-TV-intended-as-a-2-hour-pilot I caught on the 17th, on CBS’s Thursday Night Movie. The film was titled U.M.C., which stands for University Medical Center. It is coming on as a continuous series in the Fall. There are few good things to say about the film itself, for—like most medical shows in particular, and most films-for-TV in general—it was a crashing bore.

  Correction: it was a plopping bore.

  The nominal “star,” a silver-haired gentleman named Richard Bradford, is an iron-jawed type straight out of the Richard Egan mold, and played his part as the noble healer with all the verve of a three-toed sloth. The cameos were so tiny one might more accurately term them intaglios ... Edward G. Robinson said seven lines and spent the rest of the time in a coma; Maurice Evans pontificated two or three times, reminding us what the English language sounds like when spoken properly; Kim Stanley gave her usual excellent but all too brief performance; Kevin McCarthy allowed himself to perform as an attorney in the style of fustion most memorable as having been proffered by Fredric March in Inherit The Wind, a disservice to his considerable talent, and the easy way out insofar as interpretation is concerned. And that about says it.

  For the film in particular. But not for the subject of The Hero.

  You see, we’re re-entering (it would seem) the doctor cycle. A few years back it was Kildare and Casey and Breaking Point and that other psychiatric series, whatever it was called. They ran their course, and we went through the traditional situation comedy, western and detective/cop cycles. But now, with the networks spasming with a serious case of the Pastores, hoping to cure themselves of the disease of violence by blood-letting and the use of leeches, occupations such as cowboy and cop become untenable on a medium pathologically dedicated to portraying a world in which violence does not exist. So alternate Heroes must be found. Non-violent heroes. Good guys who epitomize drama without ever really getting near the heartmeat of violence that lies at the core of our troubled today.

  So what does TV come up with? Again? The doctor.

  While I would be the last one to deny that there are bold and dedicated men in the medical profession— even as there must be bold and dedicated plumbers, cabinet-makers, telephone linemen and pharmacists—it strikes me as merely one more indication of television’s paucity of inventiveness that the best they can do is offer us another spate of physicians.

  Yeah, sure, doctors are generally considered to be Heroes. They deal in life and death, and I suppose in a network presentation that can read like “high drama”; and since they sweat and struggle for years toward the ultimate goal of saving lives, they are obviously on the side of the angels. One would be a cad to suggest, however obliquely, that medical men are merely more highly-trained plumbers, cabinetmakers, pharmacists, as committed to coining a good buck as they are to the Hippocratic Oath. Yet a professional man is still a professional man, and aside from the inherent drama of dealing with life on the line, a doctor’s life is usually no more compelling or fraught with danger than that of a high-steel construction worker. Physically, I would imagine considerably less.

  (I realize this view is tantamount to heresy, not only to the AMA, which has a considerable stake in maintaining the image of the doctor as holier than thou [I anticipate the burning of a Blue Cross on my lawn], but to the even hordier hordes of yiddishe mamas, not the least of whom is mine own, who conceive of no fate for their nubile daughters as glorious as marrying a “doctuh.”)

  Where I’m going with all of this is not to a conclusion that medicine men are quacks and should not be portrayed as Heroes. Hell, John Romm, my doctor, not only cured the tendonitis inflicted on me by an over-zealous cop, but he got me off cigarettes, a feat only slightly less miraculous than the mountain giving birth to the mouse. Where I’m going is that TV’s conception of what it takes to be a Hero is slightly myopic. Jeezus, sometimes I have a gift for the ridiculously understated: myopic? Righteous tunnel vision is closer to the truth.

  So what alternates do we have for the archetypal Hero? Let’s go down the list, and see how many TV has considered.

  Let’s begin with the one I mentioned en passant a moment ago: the construction worker. Does anyone here recall a very groovy series that ran for one season in 1959, starring Keenan Wynn and Bob Mathias as The Troubleshooters? Despite some serious handicaps, not the least of which was Mathias (who, oddly enough, had much in common with “Dr.” Richard Bradford, acting-wise), the show was filled with high adventure, danger, and managed to convey, within the parameters of hokey TV melodrama, the sheer wonder of men who literally go out to change the face of the earth. The old Empire series had a segment in which Frank Gorshin portrayed a “fire dancer,” a troubleshooter called in to extinguish a wildcat oil well fire. Naked City did one of its most memorable shows about the Amerindian high steel workers in Manhattan. Non-violent in the Pastore sense of the term, the lives of builders and shapers
can be infinitely more compelling than those lives lived in sterile white corridors.

  Or how about the men of the W.H.O., the World Health Organization, if we must have doctors. Treating patients in jungles and backward, emerging nations, with all the political and ethnic conflicts attendant, must provide more pathos than that in a University Medical Center.

  What about cross-country truck drivers, a la The Price of Tomatoes? The men who push freight across this continent are heroes, too. They keep it all happening. What about Peace Corps volunteers? Or news photographers out on the line? Or men like Chuck Dederich, founder of Synanon ... Dr. Spock...committed teachers in ghetto schools ... diplomatic couriers ... social workers. About this last: George C. Scott and Susskind had the right idea. East Side, West Side may have been depressing most of the time, may have turned off the scuttlefish out in the Great American Heartland, but by Christ they dealt with depressing realities, the kind of realities the scuttlefish choose to believe don’t exist in their soft pink-and-white bunny rabbit world of Green Acres.