An Edge in My Voice

by Harlan Ellison

  What has all this to do with your charming columnist and the past two weeks’ essays inveighing against the monstrousness of knife-kill “splatter” movies in which people, mostly women, are ripped and gutted and impaled and treated like carnitas intended for some cinematic charnel house burrito? Well, I’ll tell you, gang, it went like this:

  Only a short time after I’d written those columns as an essay, shortly after I’d come to the personal position that the use of irresponsible state-of-the-special-effects gratuitous violence in exploitation films was a growing trend that would permit the wimps of the Moral Majority to impose unbearable restrictions on the motion picture industry, I had occasion to experience at first hand the way in which a nail can be hammered down by those whose floating ethics and lack of personal courage moves them only to silence for fear of invoking the wrath of the groundlings.

  My adventure through the land of the airheads began at a screening of Brian De Palma’s film Blow Out. It was a film booked by the Writers Guild Film Society Committee for its members. Now, the WGA Film Society is a private membership operation in which 1885 members of the Guild subscribe to a series of 42 films a year at $1.25 per couple. The films are booked into the available slots by a complicated process I’ll codify later. They are selected from approximately 300 offered to the Guild by the major studios, by a Film Society Committee comprising (among others) critic Arthur Knight, Ray Bradbury (one of the founders of the Society, twenty-two years ago), scenarists and teachers Arnold Peyser and William Froug, and me widdle self. More on the Committee itself later.

  Let me now reprint a letter I wrote the WGA Newsletter following the events pursuant to the screening of Blow Out. It will encapsulate the history of this contretemps and will lead into our next thrilling installment in which your intrepid pain in the ass finds himself facing the direct lineal descendants of those who stood by and watched Dreyfus get sent to Devil’s Island.

  Oh, how I do love to dramatize these encounters.

  Apologizes to Film Society

  Unaccustomed as I am to apologizing publicly for my occasional erratic behavior, I must perforce extend just such an apology to most of the audience of the Film Society screening of Blow Out at 2:00 on Sat. Aug. 1.

  What I despise in unruly audiences, what I have inveighed against more than once in these pages and in our theater…I was guilty of myself.

  Three-quarters of the way through that Brian De Palma film, without even realizing I was doing it, I leaped up and began shouting and—at the top of my voice—stalked out of the theater. It was reprehensible behavior, and I am heartily ashamed of myself for it. That I was totally unaware of what I was doing, that I was impelled by my loathing of the brutalization of women that film contains, is no excuse. It was a visceral reaction and I lost control completely. Not until I’d driven home, still trembling with disgust and anger, was my friend Jane able to tell me what I’d been screaming.

  I had no recollection of the words. But Jane tells me this is what I shouted:

  “Jesus Christ! Another sick De Palma film…I should’ve known!” (At that point I hit the aisle.)

  “The man is sick, the man is twisted.” (At that point the audience was laughing.) “Next come the mindless eviscerations and anatomy lessons!” (By that time I was out the door.)

  Don Segall (the writer, not the director) followed me out and was justifiably annoyed at my behavior. He upbraided me, saying, “If you don’t like the films you ought to resign from the Film Society,” to which I responded in a blind fury, “Resign from the Society, fer chrissakes, I’m one of the ones who picks these goddam films!”

  John Considine and his lady, and a few others, followed my example and came out also. They did it quietly. I’m told that of the several thousand attendees of the various screenings, only 16 walkouts were logged. I guess that distresses me almost as much as my own uncontrolled actions.

  My revulsion at Blow Out stemmed, in large part, from a carryover abhorrence of De Palma’s previous exercise in woman-hatred, Dressed to Kill, which we also screened at the Film Society; and from my growing awareness that these movies are more elegantly mounted examples of what has come to be known as the genre of “knife-kill flicks.”

  My gorge grew more buoyant as Blow Out progressed, pressured by a column I had written just a few days earlier on the knife-kill phenomena.

  As a member of the Film Society Committee (and I hope a responsible member), I have brought the matter of these films to the attention of my fellow committeemen. It is my feeling that we must reappraise the manner in which we select films for the members to see. I am dead against censorship of any kind. Nonetheless, we do select the films for the Society, from those available to us with considerations of play-dates and the other strictures put on us by the studios; and as we would opt not to show a film we knew in advance was a dog, it seems to me well within the bounds of our selection process that we should pay some attention to the advisability of showing films that pander to less than noble instincts in an audience.

  Ostensibly, it is the main purpose of the Society to offer to the members those films that will be of benefit in the pursuance of our craft. Even stinko films can serve that end, if only to proffer warning. But as we would not screen a film we knew to be a certified, card carrying disaster…so, I feel, we should demonstrate restraint in showing films that consciously, gratuitously debase the human spirit.

  If members of the Society wish to go to commercial theaters and pay their money to see films of this nature, all well and good. But we ought to have higher standards.

  As a craftsman who works seriously at the holy chore of screen writing, I think it’s time we examined more responsibly the nature of the cheapjack predators prowling through our industry, for whom we have to bear the brunt of censure from the New Puritans, the Moral Majority nuts and the self-styled viewers-with-alarm who want us to pre-censor what we write.

  All of us get tarred by the brush, every time another woman gets an icepick in her eye in the course of one of these films.

  —Harlan Ellison

  Interim memo

  By 5–11 February, with only three columns published in the Weekly, the happy natives were beginning to growl. Letters began appearing. Oh, you’d have loved them. Some were so vile and defamatory that the editor, Phil Tracy, a man of stern substance, forged in the cauldron of Village Voice lunacy, was reluctant to use them. Fortunately, there was enough of a need on the part of the publisher to build circulation (using me as cannon-fodder) that a few ripe items saw print. As they’ve already gone into public domain because of their publication in the Weekly, I’ve included them from this point forward, where they apply. Because occasionally I’d make reference to them in a subsequent column. You’ll find these missives following the column that appeared in the same issue of the paper with them. A sense of perversity compels me to drop all the many letters that praised me, called me the savior of humanity, that wanted me put up for canonization, alla that. I’ll only be reprinting the ones that screamed for my scalp. One of these days I’m going to do a volume of reminiscences about my weird life. I think I’ll title it WORKING WITHOUT A NET.

  Letters reprinted with permission from the L.A. Weekly

  INSTALLMENT 15: 1 FEBRUARY 82

  The essay on knife-kill splatter movies was published. Then came the Saturday my gut laid it on the line in terms of doing something about such films, not just writing about them from a safe distance. The moment when one had to walk the walk and not just talk the talk. I stormed out of a Writers Guild Film Society screening of De Palma’s hideous Blow Out. Screaming, having totally lost control, I realized that I had been one of the members of the Film Society Committee who had booked the damned film…without having seen it. A repeat of the error we on the Committee—Ray Bradbury, Arthur Knight, Allen Rivkin, William Froug, and Arnold Peyser—had committed when we’d screened De Palma’s previous exercise in woman-slaughter, Dressed to Kill.

  Then here’s what happened, v
ery fast. I wrote a letter to the Guild Newsletter apologizing for having disrupted the show, pleading temporary nutso. (Last issue’s column.) Then I requested a special meeting of the Film Society Committee to discuss our responsibility in terms of showing films whose chief appeal was a floodtide of gore. Not violence, per se: gratuitous, stomach-turning, special-effects slaughter. What I said to the other members of the Committee was that after 12 years of sitting with them selecting films, I had come to a moral position for myself only, that if we were to continue booking that kind of stuff, I’d have to motor. To my delight and resuscitation of faith in the Human Race, everyone else felt the same, and it was unanimously decided that we would exercise greater discretion when booking the films for the Society.

  We felt so good about having thus taken a stand for life over death, that critic Arthur Knight outlined all the foregoing in his August 21 “Knight at the Movies” column in The Hollywood Reporter. The first responses were gratifying. Dozens of people called and wrote to say, “Good for you!” On KNX NewsRadio, August 31, George Nicholaw, v.p. and general manager of the CBS outlet here in Los Angeles, presented an editorial in which he called the action of the Committee “leadership by example” and praised the move as an act of selectivity and not censorship.

  On the 22nd, Rip Rense in the Page 2 section of the Herald Examiner ran a brief piece about the Committee’s action and in a day or so it was picked up by the AP wire. We all felt terrific.

  Then a staff writer for the Times got hold of it and on September 2nd he wrote a “Film Clips” piece that was sufficiently muzzy in tone, lacking sufficient background about how the Film Society Committee worked, to make it appear that Bradbury and Knight and Ellison and Peyser and Froug were setting themselves up as censors. Sure. Believe that, and I’ve got some swell pterodactyl steaks I’ll sell you cheap. In case no one remembers, Bradbury’s most famous work is FAHRENHEIT 451, one of the most potent stretches of fiction ever written against censorship; and nobody who writes the stuff I write would be stupid enough to believe in even the slightest infringement on the First Amendment.

  Nonetheless. Before the day was out, the shitrain had begun to fall. Typified by the following extract from the Times article:

  One veteran screenwriter, who asked that his name not be used, said the Committee’s action reminded him of the old Hays Office, established by the movie industry in the 1920s to guard against indecency. “I remember the Hays Office and all the other crazy offices that the motion picture industry has put up,” he said. “A lot of these young people haven’t gone through that. I don’t believe in not showing anything to anybody. If our people don’t want to see something, they should stay at home.”

  There was a lot more. Nasty phone calls threatening war to the death, snide remarks from passersby at the next week’s screening (which happened to be Wolfen, a violent film we booked without moral qualms because it was a good movie about something other than titillating bloodletting), and what was for me the most hilarious incident of all:

  As I approached the Writers Guild Theater the next weekend, I saw a guy with a clipboard, soliciting signatures on a petition. I walked over, hoping it was another sign-up against James Watt, and saw it was a petition against censorship. “Hey, that’s terrific,” I said. “Lemme sign.” The guy handed me the clipboard and a pen, and I signed right on the line, adding my name in printed form, and my address. He smiled and said thanks, looked down, saw my name, and started to get crazy with me. “But this is a petition against you!” I grinned right back and said, “No it ain’t, chum. It’s against censorship and I’m for that one hundred percent, which, if you weren’t an airhead, you’d know.” So he started trying to tear off the page and I said, “Ah, ah, ah. If you do that, you invalidate the petition.” Then I went into the movie.

  But not until a meeting of the Board of Directors of the Guild, and a vote of confidence for the Committee’s procedures, did the abuse slack off. Letters continued coming in to the Writers Guild Newsletter (edited, ironically, by the very same Allen Rivkin who sits on the Committee) where each one, no matter how off-the-point or lame-brained, was duly published. I guess we just don’t have this censorship system down pat yet.

  Okay, so now we’re coming into the homestretch on this subject. Why, you ask with good sense, why isn’t what the Committee did an example of censorship? And what the hell does all this mean beyond the tempest in the teapot?

  Look: the Film Society is, first of all, a private group, open only to members of the Writers Guild of America and their families. Four or five times a year, the Committee gets together and under very difficult rules manages to select 42 films. That’s all the open slots we have. Forty-two. We have to select 42 films from the maybe 300 available to us. Most foreign films we can’t get, because the Laemmle chain of theaters controls them and figures, quite correctly I think, that the audience for “art” films is small already, why should they cut out a couple of thousand potential ticket-buyers just to give away films free to a Film Society? So we are limited in that way. Then there’s the problem of the play-dates allowed to us. We can’t show films prior to release, and can only book them for showing up to a month or so after they’ve opened. And since we have to book well in advance, what happens is that we’re selecting films that usually aren’t even in final editing when we sit down for our meetings.

  We’re operating semi-blind. But because of the makeup of the Committee, we have access to rough cuts, films in progress, studio scuttlebutt. So we avoided The Postman Always Rings Twice even though it seemed to have everything going for it in pre-release hoopla—remake in unexpurgated form of a classic James M. Cain novel, excellent director, top stars, supposedly tough script—because word leaked out that somehow this one was going into the tank, and we picked up on a film that hadn’t been sold so heavily before-the-fact because Knight had seen clips from it and thought it was going to be a comedy smash. The film was Arthur.

  We go on gut instinct and our sources throughout the industry. That’s why the members of the Committee have been appointed. Anybody in the Guild can serve on the Committee, but with the exception of those who’ve served for years, most of the summer soldiers who sit with us have no access to films, have no way of cajoling studios into parting with their precious product, and don’t like the long hours of hard work and phone calls. So the Film Committee functions in the same way as the editorial board of The Book-of-the-Month Club.

  BOMC gets offered several thousand books a year as possible selections. They pick a couple of hundred. Are they censors because they choose to offer this book and not that book? No, they are making informed selections. That’s what the Committee has been doing for 22 years.

  And here’s the airhead part. For 22 years the people who were namecalling have gone to the Guild Theater, and there’s always been a film waiting for them. How the hell did they think that film got there? The stork? Santa Claus? Didn’t they ever wonder why, on a given Saturday, they wound up watching Tess, rather than, say, Maniac or Debbie Does Dallas’

  How did they figure a film booked four months earlier got to the projection booth at the appointed time?

  None of that really matters. The system the Film Society uses is, by years of painful trial and error, the only one that can guarantee a steady flow of decent films for the members of the Guild. That’s beside the point. What matters is the question of alleged censorship, and the response of uninformed, otherwise intelligent and concerned people to the unsupported suggestion of censorship.

  The airheads seem to me to be not only doltish in this matter, but cowardly. If they really gave a damn about someone telling them what they can see and what they can’t, why aren’t they out in front of the offices of the Motion Picture Producers Association, picketing against the code that rates films G or PG or R or X? Why aren’t they lobbying against outfits like Wildmon and his religious zealots, or Falwell and his vast Moron Majority? Cowards because they accept the rules and regs set down by the television
networks that emasculate everything they write for the tube. Cowards because they let movies and books get banned all over the country and never offer their services in an amicus way to stop such depredations. Cowards because they are so terrified by the threat of a Moral Majority that they abrogate their responsibility to moral and ethical behavior for fear of looking like the enemy.

  My big RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE tells me that a censor is “any person who supervises the manners or morality of others.” In flat-out terms that means keeping someone from seeing or doing something they want to do. But if the films the Committee chooses not to select for screening—remember only 42 out of 300+ can be shown each year—are available to the public in a couple of hundred theaters all over Los Angeles…where the hell does the censoring come in?

  Now that makes simple sense. The kind of sense that becomes obvious when one takes the time to examine the question, not just rely on the word of someone shooting off his bazoo, who “asked that his name not be used.”

  But the foofaraw happened. Men who have spent most of their adult lives fighting censorship, who chose to exercise a sense of responsibility, who tried to say there are better films than these dark, ugly charnel house films, got the screaming pack of airheads on their case. Vicious fucker that I am, I suggested to the Committee that we let the airheads have their way. Instead of booking The French Lieutenant’s Woman and Absence of Malice, that we give them six straight weeks of splatter films. Friday the Thirteenth, Part II (in which a spear goes through the back of a woman, through the man she’s screwing, and impales another guy under the bed), Night School (in which decapitated heads wind up in sinks, fish tanks, toilets and a kettle of soup in a restaurant), Don’t Go In The House (in which women are tied to walls and then cremated by a guy with a flame thrower), Halloween, Part II (in which kids bite into apples filled with razor blades), and Maniac (in which a man knifes a woman to death, scalps her, puts her scalp on a dummy and then makes love to the dummy).