Harlan Ellison's Watching (69 page)

In their Sept/Oct 1985 bulletin, Judy Herman, identified as "SCAN Humanities Subject Specialist," pulled the plug on Embassy Pictures and Mr. Boorman. I quote, in part, from her findings:

"Interviews with director John Boorman reported that he had read the story in 'the Times' in 1972, but library systems were unable to find such an account through indexes to the Los Angeles, New York and London
Times
.

"SCAN called the agent for screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg, and asked for the citation to the story Boorman read in 'the Times.' He said, 'Let me make it clear: Rospo saw the story, not Boorman.'"(And so, another step away from the Given Truth.)

"The agent said he would check with Rospo and get back to us. He didn't, so we called again. He said, 'Let me make it clear: there was no one story the film was based on; it was a conglomeration of several stories. On the advice of our attorneys I cannot say more. If you need more information call Embassy Pictures.'

"Surprisingly, Embassy gave the citation:
Los Angeles Times
, October 8, 1972, sec. F, p. 10.

"The L.A.
Times
story is datelined Brazil but all the places mentioned in it are in Peru. It does not name the father, but says he was a Peruvian working as a lumberman 'along the Javari Mirim River, a tributary of the Javari, which lies in Peru.'

"On the radio program 'All Things Considered,' Boorman said that he did not try to contact the father again because the story had been changed so much in the film he didn't feel it
really pertained to this father and son any more
[italics Ellison's], but he had talked to an anthropologist who had visited the tribe recently and the son was still living with them, now aged about 35." The tribe was called (in the
Times
piece) the Mayorunas.

The SCAN piece concludes with this politely querulous note: "This is rather strange, because an article in
American Indigena
(abril/junio 1975, pp. 329–347) reports on the Mayorunas, with a detailed census by age and sex, and does not mention that one of them was an adopted outsider." Much less a blond-curly-headed son of either a Peruvian or an American.

Thus, a rational consideration of all the tumult re: "based on a true story" leads any but the most gullible to the conclusion that a writer of fiction, Rospo Pallenberg, was sparked into creating an interesting fiction by an idea proceeding from a news snippet. So far, okay. It was then bought or appropriated by Boorman, who sold it to the Embassy honchos as "based on a true story"
he
had read. From that point on, it was never really questioned, and was set on its journey to your wallet by studio flacks who embellished and aggrandized and pumped hot air. And at the terminus, you and I went to that film, amazed at the bizarre and heartrending circumstances transmogrified from Real Life onto the Silver Screen.

We were lied to, and we bought it.

Not that knowing it was principally fabrication, as opposed to slightly-al-tered-for-dramatic-effect made the film any less a pompous, strutting bore. But the being lied to . . . produces in me and possibly in you, now that you know you bit on it, a genuine anger. Like you, I don't like being made to play the fool.

Or consider such pure fantasies as
Hangar 18
(1980), a Sunn Classic Picture that was sold with the cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-plotz assurance of the producers that this was a movie that revealed the U.S. Air Force had captured a UFO, and that the spacecraft was concealed in Hangar 18 . . . or
Flying Saucer
(1950) that received enormous amounts of publicity as containing actual footage of an Alaskan UFO sighting . . . or
Frankenstein: The True Story
(1973), from a screenplay by Christopher Isherwood, which was no closer to Mary Shelley's novel than most of the other versions of the Modern Prometheus . . . or
Sharks' Treasure
(1975), a Cornel Wilde potboiler that made back its nut by advertising that swore you would see live sharks gnawing on happy natives, but which actually used
dead
sharks, pushed by hand from offcamera . . . or
Ladyhawke
(1985) that swore up'n'down that it was based on a genuine Medieval folktale, and was in fact simply a fictional construct cobbled up in the brain of the modern-day screenwriter . . . or
The Philadelphia Experiment
(1984), that was promoted as being the true story of a World War II battleship that slipped through a hole in time and wound up in the Eighties.

These are lies of a flagrant sort. They treat the audience as if it were populated by morons. At the very least they are films that consciously lie to promote themselves at the cost of spreading more obscurantism and looney beliefs in crap like channeling, "communion" with aliens, crystals, creationism, and a vast array of newly-reborn scams that only serve to alienate an already-befuddled populace from the Real World and the directing of their lives at their own responsibility. At worst, they actively convince the gullible that they are powerless in the grip of "cosmic forces" that are responsible for their bad luck, lack of a job, fucked-up relationships, and imminent demise from nuclear holocaust or angels with fiery swords.

Thus do I attempt to codify for the kind lady in Hilton, Pennsylvania why "just a movie" can send me into paroxysms of gibbering, thereby producing the flamethrower heat she finds overreactive. I wish I had a more rational answer to that anger—which I try to ennoble by the word "passionate"—but the simple truth as I've been able to perceive it, is that for the time I spend in the grip of a movie, I willingly surrender my disbelief; I am a child again, attending
Snow 'White and the Seven Dwarfs
for the first time, and all I ask is: do it to me!

When the film lies, when it loses my trust by anyone of a hundred different ineptitudes or flummeries, I respond like a betrayed lover. I fume at
Lethal Weapon
because I know damned well that Mel Gibson would never be able to make that idiotic run down Hollywood Boulevard in his bare feet, because the street is
never
as empty as the film showed it, and the overpass at which he caught up with the fleeing Gary Busey is
miles
away from Hollywood Boulevard, and not even Paavo Nurmi with JATO Adidas could overtake a felon in a speeding car. I rage at
Someone to Watch Over Me
and
Suspect
because cops and lawyers are just flat-out not stupid enough to engage in such behavior that will get them stripped of their badges or disbarred. And if it is
absolutely
necessary for them to act in ways that are so anti-survival, then I can only suspend my disbelief if the scenarist displays a level of artfulness that blows away my perceptions of the Real World and explains it all so I can accept the rationalization. What we're talking about is Art, as opposed to artifice. And when
no
attempt is made to reconcile the unbelievable fictive construct with my commonsense view of reality, then I get angry. Because I've been lied to.

Does that explain it?

Perhaps not. But I swear it's the best I can do.

All of which leads me to the "review" of
The Running Man
(Taft Entertainment Pictures/Keith Barish Productions/Tri-Star), a film both Erick Wujcik of Detroit and Brian Siano of Philadelphia have asked me to discuss in detail. I had actually planned to deal with this latest vehicle for filmdom's leading me-somorph, Arnold Schwarzenegger, rather summarily. But the subject of lying has spread its petals so appealingly, that I think I'll put it over to next time, using this installment as a sort of preamble. So keep this screed in mind, and we'll meet back here next month for
Li'l White Lies
, part two. And we'll try to discover if
The Running Man
is actually a ripoff of Robert Sheckley's "The Prize of Peril" and if
The Hidden
is really a ripoff of Hal Clement's
Needle
or just a misappropriation of a 1982 script by Gerald Gaiser called
Alien Cop
.

And I'll try to keep my temper.

ANCILLARY MATTERS: There are a handful of mythic icons that fantasists and their fans never tire of using or seeing used in stories. Hitler, the Titanic, King Kong, King Arthur, Marilyn Monroe, Jack the Ripper . . . you get the idea. Very likely topping that small list is dinosaurs. You show me a kid or an adult who doesn't get a smile and the shivers when you mention dinosaurs, and I'll show you a kid or an adult who would happily eat lima beans or vote for Pat Robertson. Well, it's not often that we are dazzled by some new variation on the presentation of the saurians, but Celestial Arts (PO Box 7327, Berkeley, CA 94707) has released a set of four dinosaur posters in their Dinosauria Graphics Series that will absolutely steal your breath away. They're big—24 × 32 inches each—and they come in four flavors: Stegosaurus, Brachiosaurus, Triceratops and Tyrannosaurus. The artwork is by Earl C. Bateman III, each one has a background grid with a metric scale to provide a sense of size, and each one has—are you ready for this—an overprinted skeleton that
glows in the dark!
Each one comes with a nifty little 16-page illustrated booklet that contains the latest skinny on what we know about the saurians, and I've got to tell you that these are knockout posters. And you will love me for turning your attention to the set of four. Even if your spouse or roomie is a lima bean eater, you can pretend you're buying these for some kid's room, and make nocturnal visits to enjoy the glow-in-the-dark skeletons. These are visuals that will make you feel ten years old again.

In my February essay I used the old expression "liver and lights" and explained that it referred to "the soul and eyes." Well, y'know how you go through years and years mispronouncing some word you've only read, and never actually heard spoken, and you get it wrong till one day you hear someone say it correctly and you thank your stars that no one ever caught you making a fool of yourself, and thereafter you pronounce it properly? (With me it was the word
minutiae
, but that's another story for another time.) I'd been using "liver and lights" for years and always thought it meant the soul and the eyes. I was wrong. As (among others) Jim Bennett of Newport, RI and Brad Strickland of Oak-wood, GA politely pointed out.
Liver and lights
, as the first pirate or barbarian warlord who used the phrase intended it, meant the liver and
lungs
, the entrails, the 'umbles. Of which said pirate or warlord might make an "'umble pie," or of use to feed his dogs. Jim advised me "lights" is hunters' jargon for "lungs." I hate being wrong, but I love it when I'm set straight.

We are all in this together, it seems.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ May 1988

A NOTE ON SEQUENTIALLY

There is nothing wrong with your neocortex. We control the vertical, we control the horizontal. These columns are in precisely the order I wish them to be: Installment 29, followed by Installment 30 ½, followed by 30 and 31. You can see from the publication dates that these are the sequence in which they appeared in print. If you ask why, I tell you it was because my attention was diverted. If you say that is irresponsible, I tell you that it's my party, and I'll cry if I want to. Yours truly, The White Rabbit.

On September 9th, 1977, 1 left for Paris to begin work with director William Friedkin on a theatrical feature based on my short story, "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs." The story, winner of a Mystery Writers of America Edgar Allan Poe award as best short story of 1974, was to have starred Jeanne Moreau. Because of film industry problems pursuant to the trade unions' contract raises, due early in 1978, it was contractually imperative that I have the script completed by the end of October. I was not able to meet that deadline.

The short story from which the screenplay was to have been expanded, was a fantasy based on the real-life murder of a woman named Catherine Genovese, in the section of Queens called Kew Gardens, in 1964.

At the time, the killing made worldwide headlines chiefly because it had been witnessed by thirty-eight neighbors of Kitty Genovese, not one of whom made the slightest effort to save her, to scream at the killer, or even to call the police. (One man, in fact, viewing the murder from his third-floor apartment window, stated later that he rushed to turn up his radio so he wouldn't hear the woman's screams.) The excuse offered by almost every one of those wretched thirty-eight witnesses, was that "I didn't want to get involved." It became an emblematic incident of an alienated society, and entire books have been written on the phenomenon.

(And for those who have sought to dismiss the incident as an isolated aberration of its time, here are excerpts from the opening paragraphs of a
New York Times
article dated Friday, December 28th, 1974: "While at least one neighbor heard her dying screams and did nothing, a 25-year-old model was beaten to death early Christmas morning in her Kew Gardens, Queens, apartment, which virtually overlooks the scene of the murder of Catherine Genovese 10 years ago . . . The 10-story red brick building where the latest murder occurred was the residence of many of the 38 witnesses who heard or saw the knife-slaying of Miss Genovese on the street below in the early morning hours of March 13, 1964, and neither called the police nor took any other action . . . . The latest victim, Sandra Zahler of 82–67 Austin Street, was apparently slain about 3:20 AM Wednesday, when a woman in the next-door apartment on the fifth floor said she heard screams and the sounds of a fierce struggle . . . . Madeline Hartmann, who lives in the apartment next to the victim's and who recalled having heard the screams of Miss Genovese 10 years ago, told in an interview of having heard Miss Zahler scream and of other sounds of an apparent struggle . . . . While most of those who witnessed the murder of Miss Genovese have moved away from Kew Gardens, some because of negative publicity about their inaction, some still remain in the neighborhood and a few still live in the building where Miss Zahler died.") In an eerie way, the fantasy-horror explanation I presented in my story for the behavior of those thirty-eight people, was validated by the murder of the Zahler woman ten years later. In fact, Sandra Zahler might easily have been the real-life model for the heroine of "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs," and the fate that befell her might as easily have come straight out of my fiction. (For those unfamiliar with the story, it can be found in my collections
Deathbird Stories
and last year's
The Essential Ellison
, as well as in a number of anthologies including
Best Detective Stories of the Year: 1974
and
The Year's Best Horror Stories, Series III
, and the recent David Hartwell-edited anthology,
The Dark Descent
.)