Harlan Ellison's Watching (40 page)

Digression: Scott said something remarkable that has stuck in my mind. He said, "The time is ripe for a John Ford of science fiction films. I'm going to be that director." And maybe he hasn't achieved that yet, but sooner the man who helmed
Alien
and
Blade Runner
and
The Duellists
than John Carpenter or George Lucas or Joe Dante. End of digression II.

Though I like to think Ridley's spirit was crushed at not being able to suffer the torments of the damned by having had the bad sense to hire me, he pulled himself together like the special talent he is, and he hired Rudolph Wurlitzer.

Wurlitzer's has been a strange filmwriting career.

In April of 1971—just four months before the magazine would abandon the 10? × 13? bedsheet format it had held for 38 years
—Esquire
ran as its hot cover feature a screenplay titled
Two-Lane Blacktop
with the blurb READ IT FIRST! OUR NOMINATION FOR THE MOVIE OF THE YEAR! The screenplay was by Rudolph Wurlitzer and Will Corry.

Well, the film dropped into an abyss and, though it has become something of a cult classic and is an interesting item because of a Warren Oates performance that is a killer, and some offbeat direction by Monte Hellman, not only wasn't it the movie of the year, it vanished without a plop! In the same year Wurlitzer's screenplay for a post-holocaust film called
Glen and Randa
was produced. Another miraculous non-event in cinema history though, again, an interesting piece of writing. Then in 1973 Sam Peckinpah directed Wurlitzer's gawdawful screenplay of
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid
, starring James Coburn and (wait for it) Kris Kristofferson. That one created its
own
black hole down which it plunged.

And that was it. No other produced credits exist as of this writing for Wurlitzer. But in 1979 Ridley Scott put Rudy Wurlitzer to work. The most memorable aspect of the three drafts Wurlitzer wrote was his departure from the novel to include a relationship that poor, misguided Frank Herbert had overlooked: a sexual liaison between Paul Atreides and his mother, the Lady Jessica.

Have you ever heard Frank Herbert bellow with rage?

The Sargasso Sea came unblocked. Avalanches on the Siberian Peninsula. Magma solidified. The stars shook.

By 1980 the deal was dead. Scott went on to
Blade Runner
, Wurlitzer went underground, and De Laurentiis went looking for new foot troops to throw into what was becoming the cinematic equivalent of Hitler's Russian campaign.

Dune
.

The name had become legend. The bodies that lay in its sandworm track could have populated another whole film industry.

But in 1981 De Laurentiis shocked even those of us who are beyond shock, by signing the director of
Eraserhead
and
The Elephant Man
, and David Lynch stepped up bravely to inhale them bullets.

Four years later
Dune
was a reality, more than forty million dollars had been expended in its production, the world trembled at its imminent release, and in mere moments before it hit the screens of the world, everything hit the fans in that equally-fabled Black Tower where derangement is a way of life.

And in the next issue I'll bring you full circle, as one with the Laocoönian serpent, to complete the bizarre story of Frank Herbert,
Dune
, De Laurentiis father and daughter, untold millions of dollars and lire, and the strange rituals of the priests of the Black Tower.

Don't miss this one, kids. You'll boogie till you puke.

PUBLIC NOTICE: Got a call today from my friend Bill Warren. Bill is a film critic, author of a nifty book on Fifties sf movies, and a cinema researcher who works with the Hollywood Film Archive. When it comes to movies, Bill's middle name is
knowledgeable
. Sometimes, amazingly, our opinions agree on a specific film. For years we have taken mutual pleasure in passionate arguments about the nature of movies. In my installment 7, in the time-honored tradition of gigging my chums, I took Bill's (and Steve Boyett's) name in vain. I said that these "alleged movie buffs" accepted a philosophy expressed by many duplicitous filmmakers that one should not take seriously the evil and gruesome aspects of some films because they were really only live action "cartoons." The word
alleged
was, of course, intended as goodnatured elbow-in-the-ribs hyperbole. That Bill and Steve have expressed to me their concurrence with the "don't take it seriously, it's just a cartoon" disclaimer is true. They've said it to me on a number of occasions, about a number of films. In the case of Bill, most recently in reference to
Gremlins
; Steve said it a short time ago about
Buckaroo Banzai
. But Bill called me in a state of upset today, to say I owe him an apology in the same public forum where I defamed him, in his view. He read my remarks in that column to say that he is a liar. I did not call Bill Warren a liar, nor anything even remotely like it. As far as I know, Bill Warren is not a liar. Nor was I calling Steve Boyett a liar. What I
did
say, is what I said; and it was intended to make my friends smile ruefully. But Bill feels I have done him a mischief. Because he is my friend, and because I respect him, I will apologize here in print, on the off-chance that someone else may have interpreted my remarks in a way I did not intend; but I apologize mostly because Bill is upset, and he is my friend. So one does this sort of thing for friends.

But really, Bill, you shouldn't take it all so seriously: it was just a cartoon.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ June 1985

Synopsis of Part One of this thrilling essay:

The critic attempted to establish, as philosophical background for weighty matters to be discussed in Part Two, that an ambience of derangement surrounds the milieu known as Universal Studios. Then, when the reader felt secure that the critic was going to discuss lunacy at the fabled Black Tower of Universal, he jerked them around again, as is his wont, by veering away in a (seemingly) unrelated digression that detailed the fifteen-year frustration of those who have attempted to bring Frank Herbert's
Dune
to the big screen. The critic made much of the expectations of the filmgoing audience; their Cheyne—Stokes respiration at the merest mention of the magic name
Dune
; the universal (though as we will see, not Universal) belief that this was one of the most mythic, most exciting, most eagerly-anticipated films of all time. Absolutely. Early on in Part One, the critic made this cryptic remark:

"Yes, I think
deranged
is the proper adjective, particularly when Universal makes a corporate decision to scramble all its eggs in one basket.
Dune
."

What could this have meant? At what dark secrets was the critic hinting? Did he, in fact, begin to tie together the disparate elements of Part One with this pair'o'paragraphs:

"Four years later
Dune
was a reality; more than forty million dollars had been expended in its production; the world trembled at its imminent release; and in mere moments before it hit the screens of the world, everything hit the fans in that equally fabled Black Tower where derangement is a way of life.

"And in the next issue I'll bring you full circle, as one with the Laocoonian serpent, to complete the bizarre story of Frank Herbert,
Dune
, De Laurentiis father and daughter, untold millions of dollars and lire, and the strange rituals of the priests of the Black Tower."

Now go on, simply all atremble, to the thrilling Part Two!

There will be mass screenings of
Dune
. There will be no mass screenings of
Dune
. There will be several sneak previews of
Dune
, but only on the West Coast. There will be sneak previews of
Dune
, but only in suburban New York and Connecticut. We are running screenings of
Dune
for the press at Universal only for the first two weeks in December, prior to the December 14th nationwide release. All press screenings of
Dune
have been canceled. A screening has been set up, but only those press representatives with specially-accepted credentials will be invited. The special press screening for an elite group has been canceled. Yes on
Dune
. No on
Dune. Dune
's in,
Dune
's out, surf's up!

Those are notes from my log book of daily appointments. They begin in mid-November of last year, and they go right on through to December 12th when I actually got to see
Dune
.

If the word
deranged
echoes in that paragraph of windy contradictions, well, who're ya gonna call, Ghostbusters?

As I write this in March of 1985,
Dune
has come and gone, and you have very likely seen it. Some of you liked it; some of you didn't like it. Apparently, not one of you was satisfied.

In the time-honored tradition of now-crepuscular fan pundits—so crapulously into their twilight years that their declamations no longer girn from the pages of know-it-all fanzines—every aficionado endowed with mouth has had his/her scream. It was too big. It wasn't enough. It left too much out. It included too much. It was simplistic. It was too convoluted. It was too serious. It wasn't serious enough.
Dune
's in,
Dune
's out, surf's up, shut your pie-hole!

Can't anybody see there's something wrong here?

Doesn't anybody else notice that otherwise rational critics have savaged
Dune
way the hell out of proportion to its weaknesses? Even Roger Ebert, former sf fan and good film observer, picked
Dune
as the worst film of the year. Ain't dat the same year that gave us
Children of the Corn; Porky's II; Teachers; Gremlins; Body Double; Conan the Destroyer; Buckaroo Banzai; Streets of Fire; Breakin' 2: Electric Boogaloo; Sheena; Where the Boys Are; Up the Creek; Sahara; Tank; Red Dawn; Rhinestone; Hot Dog . . . The Movie; Angel; Bachelor Party; Bolero; Hardbodies
, and
Give My Regards to Broad Street?
Ain't it dat same year?

In such a year of gasp, wheeze, pant, choke, gimme a sec to let my gorge settle, in such a year
Dune
is the worst film!??!

No, gentlefolk, something went wrong. Of a nature that has to do with public and private perceptions. Of a sort that defies logic because, like politics, it is a matter of image. Codification of what happened, of the skewing of expectations, progressed so rapidly and with such economy of action, that if one were given to conspiracy theories one might well take the case of the release of
Dune
to one's bosom for the sheer clarity of its
modus operandi
. But let me, for an instant, give you a f'rinstance. Helpful digression. Explanation by example. A bit of storytelling.

William Friedkin is, in my view, an extraordinary director. There is a subterranean river of dark passion rushing wildly in the subtext of all his films—successful and disastrous—that clearly marks him as an artist almost manic with the need to rearrange the received universe in a personal, newly-folded way. With only two films,
The French Connection
in 1971 and
The Exorcist
in 1973 (neither, in my view, Friedkin's most compelling work), he established himself as the box-office Colossus of Roadshows.

Then he took four years to bring forth an astonishing film called
Sorcerer
. An honorable (and acknowledged)
hommage intense
to Clouzot's 1952 classic
The Wages of Fear
, Friedkin's labors and vision in the jungles of the Dominican Republic—which came close to killing him, so physically near to danger did his pathological involvement force him—produced a motion picture that laid bare the corpus of human compulsion with images that smoldered.

The film died. It was driven into oblivion to such an extent that nowhere in Pauline Kael's five books of criticism is the movie even mentioned. And the core reasons for its universal (and, not surprisingly, Universal) dismissal can be found in
Sorcerer's
listing in
Halliwell's Film Guide
, the basic reference work on cinema (page 761, 4th edition):

"Why anyone should have wanted to spend twenty million dollars on a remake of
The Wages of Fear
, do it badly, and give it a misleading title is anybody's guess. The result is dire."

Dire?
Dire!?!
Halliwell does not bristle thus at the vile and venal remakes of
Stagecoach, King Kong, Cat People, The Jazz Singer, The Thing, The Big Sleep
or the 1981 remake of
The Incredible Shrinking Man (Woman)
as a vehicle for Lily Tomlin, even while acknowledging their failure. But
Sorcerer
produces uncommon bile in the usually mild-mannered Leslie Halliwell.

And while my theory of movie crib-death may be all blue sky surmise as regards
Dune
, so close to the immolation, we can use Kael and Halliwell as indicators of why Friedkin and
Sorcerer
were summarily dismissed after uncommon savaging, and then extend the premise.