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

by Harlan Ellison

  I countered with an observation that she wore her skirt well above her knees, and that only a few years ago had she chosen to do so, she’d have been arrested for indecent exposure. I presented it as an example of how people fear to do what they want, until the mass accepts it. And that, I concluded, was denying one’s own soul.

  The discussion got a tot hairy, at least on my part, as I pointed out that girls matured earlier today than they did even twenty years ago, because of diet, assault of information through the visual media, because of the mobility provided by cars-for-everyone. And I said if teen-aged girls wanted to have sex, that was cool, as long as the responsible media, such as Miss Hammond’s TV show, informed them The Pill was available. Miss Hammond was speechless (confidantes in the Bryan area informed me it was the first time they’d ever seen her so) and the cameraman got so nervous he let go of the elevation control on the camera, which proceeded to drift ceilingwards, giving everyone an unobstructed view of the lights and flies above us.

  Now, mark this: what went down between Miss Hammond and myself was nothing startling, nor even terribly radical. By our standards. It was old hat in literature and even films ten years ago. But television, playing to some mythical audience of cretins and scuttle-fish, persists in maintaining lies and outdated postures that only serve to confuse and encyst the viewers.

  Multiply Fern Hammond and the implicit lies of her chit-chat show by a thousand, for every TV station in every locality in America, and you understand, finally, why Richard Nixon won the Presidency; you understand why George Wallace cadged 14% of the vote; you understand why a large segment of the “straight” students on campuses band together—as they did at Long Beach State—to fight the very kids who are putting their educations, their futures and sometimes their lives on the line, to provide better facilities and more open discussion for all.

  Fern Hammond is by no means an evil woman. Yet by her tacit acceptance of the status quo, by her abrogation of the responsibility of letting her viewers know what the real world is about, she serves the ends of evil in this country.

  She is one with all the decaying corpses of bigotry who poured the poison into the ears of girls such as the one who rode her horse through Marion County. And until people as outspoken, passionate and caring as, say, Tom Smothers begin hosting shows like Town Talk, the greater portion of average citizens in this country will be kept in the dark. While their age-old prejudices and fears are played upon by craftsmen like George Putnam and Tom Reddin and Paul Harvey and Joe Pyne, all the Fern Hammonds of boondock TV will lull them into believing nothing is happening, that their world is merely a trifle dyspeptic, rather than helping to cure the cancer that will surely destroy us all without crystal awareness of just how imminent are the dangers.

  It was that way all through the week in Texas. I found people who could by no stretch of the imagination be called evil, but who served the ends of the demons by having been lied to so engagingly by television, that anything outside the simple good-and-bad Disneyism of what they’d been programmed to understand, seemed destructive, seemed radical and deserving of death.

  It was not difficult to understand how all those 13,000 A&M students could be lock-stepped toward the gray cubicles of the military or giant corporations. It was the end-result of a cultural pattern set in motion many years ago, whose aim it was to produce a mindless, unfeeling, basically hostile and subservient mass, fit for no better than serving the financial ends of the corporate behemoths.

  What did I find in Texas, gentle readers?

  I found a cheerless, empty Stonehenge of complacency, stupidity, desperation and amenity. I felt compassion for all of them. They suspect the rest of the country of being engaged in a monstrous plot to corrupt and kill them. They have been lied to, seduced, bludgeoned and hypnotized by the monster eye of television.

  And if there is any saving them, it will have to be through a long, passionate war of re-education and freedom. Before I went to Texas, my gut had been with revolution, but I’d had reservations. Now I have none.

  For I’ve seen what happens to the mass when the Reddins, the Putnams, the Pynes and the Harveys are allowed to disseminate their hideous view of reality without being opposed.

  I tell you straight, friends, the lingering death is a far more hideous one than that postulated by those who fear fire and the storm.

  The question thus becomes: who will send missionaries to underprivileged, emerging nations such as Texas?

  * * * *

  31: 16 MAY 69

  For my next number, friends, a genuine open suicide note. Watch Ellison kill himself, before your very eyes.

  You see, it’s like this. I’m a writer. That’s not just what I do, it’s what I am. Understanding that, you can perhaps understand why I am impatient with my fellow members of the Writers Guild of America who don’t seem offended by their number who are crummy writers.

  In an intelligent discussion of television, and the reasons why it is deficient in so many areas, the writer must come in for his share of mea culpa. While it is no secret that writers in the television arena are considered little more than chattel, to be used then excluded from any of the important artistic decisions between script stage and screening, still it cannot be denied that a share of the blame for bad TV can be laid to the writers.

  This seems to me a fair statement, and one that should upset—least of all—the conscientious writers in the Guild. Yet, a statement I made in one of these columns, many months ago, was picked up by a fellow Guild-member, and has been used as an example of my “disloyalty” to my chosen union.

  The offending remark went as follows: “Most of them [my fellow scriptwriters] couldn’t write their way out of a pay-toilet for openers, and they simply don’t have the craft or the heart to write what matters, what counts, what we can feel and care about.” The remark was part of an article on the abrogation of responsibility to those who create, to utilize their passion to present a more realistic portrait of the world today on television. It was not a diatribe against writers solely, for it took to task actors, producers, directors and network mufti. It appeared in the October 18th Free Press, my third column to hit print. And yet, of all the matters I’ve discussed here, all the pressing topics with which TV has dealt or avoided, it was this lone sentence that caused a fellow Guild member, Mr. Mort R. Lewis, to speak out against me. His forum was a letter to the Writers Guild Newsletter just this month, and...

  But I get way ahead of myself.

  If I’m going to commit suicide, at least let me do it in as neat a way as possible. It starts like so:

  The Writers Guild has a Film Society.

  We see advance screenings of new films twice a month. Several years ago, we had such a rash of unmannerly behavior at these screenings—booing and catcalling—that several studios refused to allow their films to be shown at our Film Society. At that time, strong outcries were heard from many responsible members of the Guild to try and quash this ungentlemanly behavior. The decorum was restored.

  But two months ago, it started again. In specific, the rudeness was demonstrated at two films written by, or from the works of, members who happened to be present at the screenings. The display of bad manners was disgraceful, and made the more horrendous by the presence of the men who had created the films. One of them fled in embarrassment.

  In my anger at this sorry display of intellectual inflexibility, I wrote a letter to the Newsletter addressed to “Writers Guild Swine,” that is, the rude among our membership who demean their brother members. It was a quite loonie letter, written in the same tone of rudeness as the original demonstrations. It was printed.

  A month went by, and in the current issue of the Newsletter are replies. Naive Tom Sawyer that I be, I rather thought my fellow Guild members would join in to condemn the rank gross-outs of the vocal few. But instead, every one of the letters printed condemned me for being a brash Neanderthal who would dare to tell anyone anything.

  (Now understand someth
ing: I am against censorship of any kind, any time, anywhere. If a film, or a TV show, or a book, or an act of artistic creation of any kind offends or bores or insults you . . . put it down! I have been known to groan with undisguised nausea as my gorge became buoyant, at many a flick. But it seems to me a special kind of cruelty, to make a public display of gratuitous rudeness in the presence of the men who invested their craft and art in the presentation. I know they boo and hiss in theaters in Europe, and I cannot say this is a bummer...but we of the Writers Guild are supposed to be on a somewhat more elevated plane than “mere filmgoers.” We are alleged to be men and women with some sensibilities where the craft is concerned, and a bad film should be an exercise in avoidance for us. We should take the lesson of failure as offered, and profit by it. Hooting and belching makes us no better than the fraternity crowds that attend the Saturday night AIP flicks, throwing popcorn and screaming clichés for the amusement of their dates.)

  Well, to get on with it ... whatever my motivations for writing the letter, the responses were unanimous in their affront and disgust with me; for speaking out.

  And that, in a Guild where silence seems to prevail with all but a dedicated handful, was tantamount to heresy. I was obviously a smartass upstart telling his betters what to do, and bastioning my position with threats of violence—which really uptighted them.

  Now, I suppose it wouldn’t have much mattered, and would have soon been forgotten, but it seems that your humble columnist is also running for a position on the Council of the film branch of the Writers Guild of America, West.

  Needless to say, my credentials were hopelessly compromised. Several days running, after the platform statements of the candidates had been mailed out to the membership, I received unsigned hate letters with my statement torn in quarters, and enclosed as a notification that I would not be voted for. That’s cool.

  Better they should know where I’m at, in front, than think I’m running on a platform of silence and then be surprised to find me a viper at their breast.

  All of which brings me to Mort R. Lewis’s letter, in which he proves the hypocrisy of my being upset at the rudeness of the few, when I had the audacity to say most of my fellow screenwriters couldn’t write their way out of a pay-toilet. And to my committing suicide in public. Because what I’m about to say will certainly insure my being passed-over by the voters.

  I say it now. not out of any misplaced courage, but because it needs to be said, and if I safely waited till after the election, I would find myself wondering if I’d done it out of fear, or sick need to be elected.

  What I have to say, Mr. Lewis, and all of you, is this:

  Sturgeon’s Law holds true, especially for writers. The Law says: 94% of everything is shit. Puddings, plays, poetry, parties, pistols, people. That is, ninety-four per cent of everything is merely average. Merely sufficient. There is only 6% grandeur in the universe anywhere!

  That means ninety per cent of the writers in any given field are shit. Most screenwriters can’t write their way out of pay-toilets. Sorry, Mr. Lewis. But if you doubt it, read their scripts.

  Even mine. Often, they’re shit. The only difference, I suppose, between them and me is that I never set out to write shit. (That is: merely sufficient, average.) And of all the crimes that may be attributed to me—numbering among them rudeness, lechery, viciousness, imprudence and disgusting egocentricity—the one that can never be laid on me is the one epitomized by the line, “I just write what they want, by Tuesday, take the money and run.” I’ve heard too many of my fellow

  Guild members say it to feel ashamed that I said they couldn’t write their way out of pay-toilets.

  They aren’t even honest hacks, Mr. Lewis.

  An honest hack writes entertainment, and has no pretensions to greatness, such as flawed scriveners like myself. Honest hacks like Melville and Dickens and Trocchi and Simenon and MacDonald and Sam Clemens. They only wanted to entertain, Mr. Lewis. But they at least did it in their own voices. They didn’t sell out before they were asked to. They didn’t bear the responsibility for a nation being lied-to and badly-used and corrupted by its best medium of information. They cared about what they wrote, Mr. Lewis, even as some members of the Guild care about what they write. Men like John D.F. Black, and George Clayton Johnson, and Lee Pogostin, and Christopher Knopf, and Bruce Geller, and Howard Rodman.

  You see, Mr. Lewis, I’m a guttersnipe. I have no class. I don’t know enough to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with fellow Guild members who don’t give a damn. I take pride in my craft, Mr. Lewis. I think we can change the face of not only TV Land America . . . but the face of our times! And I’m more concerned, as a member of the Writers Guild, with getting some control over my scripts than getting a few bucks more per segment. Right now, most TV writers are hideously overpaid for the kind of idiocy they write. But then, so are directors, and grips, and everybody else concerned with the imbecilic business of slapping together clichés, so that faceless gray men out there somewhere can sell more rectal suppositories.

  That’s what I meant about the pay-toilets, Mr. Lewis. Look, it’s like this: the Guild is a beautiful thing. It is responsible for more advances in working conditions in The Industry than any other Guild. It operates out of strength, because there is a fierce kind of pride in being a writer. And the Guild is a banding-together of individual, eccentric, non-conformist, prideful men and women. But a Guild is a union, and a union can only stand when all stand together. Yet that does not mean that some of us cannot rail against the inept practitioners of our midst. Every time a bad script is flung out over the channelways, all writers suffer.

  Joyce Miller, herself a TV writer, does a radio show called Encounter over KPFK. She asked me on as a guest a few weeks ago. We argued about the state of TV, and what could be done to better it. She suggested we should “starve it to death”; the creative talents should move off, do other things, till the medium got so bad they’d call for the talent, and then we’d take back control of our television. I told her she was wrong.

  You know why she’s wrong, Mr. Lewis? Because there will always be mediocre writers and directors and actors who will fill the empty hours that must be filled with product. Just as “W. Hermanos” wrote all those pseudonymous scripts during the writers strike in 1960.

  We can’t starve them by running away. We can only beat them by staying and writing like such bloody beautiful motherfuckers that they can’t not put our scripts on as we write them.

  That’s what I meant by pay-toilets, Mr. Lewis.

  I’m a writer, not a carpenter or a plumber or a bricklayer. Writing is a holy chore. And I don’t give a damn if I’m not elected, or if you bounce my ass out of the Guild, or if you shove a thermite bomb up my tuchis ... I’ll still curse the lousy writers in our Guild who write the slop and the pap and the insulting, degraded Creative Typing they call scripts. Because they weaken us, they sell out in the cheapest, ugliest way to the forces that seek to own our souls and our thoughts.

  Pride in craft, Mr. Lewis. Can you dig that! Or is all you’ve read in these pages the line you chose to remember for eight months? Are you that afraid our Guild is weak, that you refuse to admit most of us don’t write very well? Come on, Mr. Lewis, who the hell is writing all that tripe if it isn’t us? Do elves come in, during the night, and cobble up those inept teleplays?

  Maybe it’s just because I come out of the publishing bag, Mr. Lewis, where—unlike films and TV—they don’t pay you till after you’re done and they like it. Maybe it’s because I figure a writer should think of himself as something nobler than an employee, and what he writes as something more noble than bricks or puddings. Maybe it’s because when I came out here and became, with pride, a member of our Guild—our Guild, Mr. Lewis—I thought I could write what hadn’t been written before, say what others hadn’t said, not merely to fill empty hours with emptier refuse, but to change the face of our times, Mr. Lewis! Maybe that is why I said pay-toilets.

  Because . . . and you’
d better dig this, Mr. Lewis...the times are too perilous, the stakes too high, the forces aligned against us too powerful ... to permit second-rate, untalented ex-PR men and mailroom boys to write the words and form the thoughts that follow on the heels of that holiest of phrases ...

  “Written by...”

  Vote NO on Ellison, Mr. Lewis. Ifs safer.

  * * * *

  32: 30 MAY 69

  Two weeks ago, as you read this, I went for a walk in the Imperial Valley with some other TV folk, in support of the Grape Pickers’ Strike against the table-grape growers of Delano and the Coachella Valley. No one needs to be told how important and how noble this strike is, nor with what a sense of holy purpose and personal dignity it has been pursued by Cesar Chavez and his long-suffering, incredible people.

  Yet how strange it is, to walk in 118 degree heat down a dusty road toward Calexico, in the company of bronzed farmworkers who trudged that road all the way from Indio—to find oneself confronted again with the mythic import and impact of television on every dark corner of the culture. For even though some of those dusty pilgrims had suffered and hobbled (one man was on crutches most of the way) over a hundred miles to reach the Mexican border, in an attempt to appeal to the “green card” workers who are trucked across late at night to work the struck vineyards, the radio and television interviewers fastened on our little band of “Hollywood celebrities” and spent an inordinate amount of time getting our reactions and opinions ... though we were to walk only seven miles.