Harlan Ellison's Watching (76 page)

Here is what the studio press packet on
Alien Nation
says of Rock:

Born in Los Angeles, Rockne S. O'Bannon was raised in the film industry; his father was a gaffer and his mother a contract dancer at MGM. While most ten-year-olds were reading The Hardy Boys and comic books, he was reading screenplays smuggled home by his father. He learned the business by working in the mailroom and leading guided tours at a major studio. He went on to work as a production assistant on Lorimar's television productions
The Waltons
and
Apple's Way
.

From age eight O'Bannon knew he wanted to be a writer. His first stab at screenwriting was developing a script for what he thought was a natural spin-off of his then favorite television series
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
entitled "Boy from U.N.C.L.E." O'Bannon continued writing screenplays through high school and upon graduation took six months off to concentrate seriously on his writing. That's when he moved from mailroom to production assistant at Lorimar.

After leaving Lorimar, he returned to college to continue his English studies, but in a short time dropped out when he got a job at MGM. He stayed there several years working in the publicity department and the story department, simultaneously writing the studio's company newspaper.

Having an office to himself afforded O'Bannon the means to continue writing scripts while working at his job. After he had written several scripts on spec, his agent submitted a script for the recently revived
Twilight Zone
television series. The producers were so impressed with his "Wordplay" episode that they hired him to write more scripts and to serve as the story editor for the first season. He went on to work as a consultant during the second season. During the hiatus, he wrote the "Life on Death Row" episode of Steven Spielberg's anthology series,
Amazing Stories
.

It was during this period that O'Bannon met
Alien Nation
's co-producer, Richard Kobritz, and told him of his story idea for the film, formerly titled
Outer Heat
. They have since formed a partnership and are developing a project which O'Bannon plans to direct with Kobritz serving as the producer.

When the producers of
The Twilight Zone
were trying to inveigle me into returning to television after ten years of voluntary abstinence from that most beguiling and lucrative of addictions, they sent me a small stack of scripts that had been accepted by CBS as correct for the re-thunk, contemporary version of that classic series. Several of them were knockouts, several of them were acceptable, several of them were stinkers, and one of them blew me into orbit.

It was Rock's eighteen-page, airtime-seventeen-minute story, "Wordplay." It was a marvel. Nothing less than a marvel.

If you missed it, you missed one of the classic moments of fantasy on television, and a tale of imagination that is, in my view, on a par with the very best that has ever been done in the genre of the fantastic:

A perfectly average guy wakes one odd day to find that everyone is speaking a different language. Well, not exactly. It's still English, but the words have different meanings, different uses. A brash, young guy who works in the protagonist's company approaches him for advice. He says: "Hey, Mr. Thompson. You know that new girl in accounting? Barbie? I've been asking her out and finally, today, she says okay—but she's gonna be here in five minutes and I can't think of anyplace to take her for dinosaur. I mean, I thought of the Capitol Inn, but then that might look like I'm trying too hard. What d'you think?"

Thompson looks at him and laughs. He replies, "You're planning to take this young woman out for
dinosaur
, huh?"

And when the kid repeats it, confused at Thompson's wry response, Thompson thinks he's putting him on. The kid gets huffy. "Look, Mr. Thompson, if you don't want to, uh, or can't think of anyplace, I'll just ask somebody else."

It gets worse and worse. More and more words gibber and dance out of Thompson's reach. Dinosaur, for lunch. Peaches, for rain. Segregate, for clear. On and on, till people are calling him Hinge instead of Bill, and his wife, trying to tell him that their child is dying and they must get him to a hospital, shrieks, "Dark outer! Kettle rod that thought collins around! Moon tight! Moon tight!"

In seventeen minutes, Rock O'Bannon creates, complicates and solves an apocryphal human dilemma that, in terms of modern fable, encapsulates the terror and helplessness of modern man's inability to orient himself in a bewildering technocratic society.

It is, in my view, simply brilliant, by every standard of fine writing we accept as necessary for the creation of true literature, true Art. He was twenty-eight years old when he wrote it.

I took the job on
TZ
, in large part, because the producers had been smart enough to snap up that script from the slush pile. If they could spot top-level writing like that, then there was hope for the series, and I might yet find myself working among artists, not sausage-merchants.

Working with Rock O'Bannon was a delight. I never thought of him as a tyro, as a youngster breaking in. He was a peer. And so he remains today.

But
Alien Nation
, his debut as a feature film writer, is a woeful, empty thing. He was thirty-two when he wrote it, last year. I'll get back to Rock, and that kick in the ass, in a moment; but first, let me review
Alien Nation
for you, so you won't waste your money seeing it.

Los Angeles. Near future. Three hundred thousand aliens, bred to be workers, slaves, beanfield hands from outer space, arrive on Earth. They look a lot like us, but are grotty enough to be considered the new "niggers." They are shunted into a ghetto, and because they have been bred to adapt almost totally to whatever environment becomes their lot, they are soon just like all of us—shopkeepers, cops, hookers, fast-food clerks, mechanics, street thugs. Suddenly, there is a murder of a human by a "slag" (the epithet for "newcomer"). Unthinkable. So a human cop, played by James Caan, is linked with the first "newcomer" to make the grade of detective on the LAPD, Mandy Patinkin as Sam Francisco. Together they set out to solve the baffling murder, mysteriously linked to the slaying of two "newcomers."

Baffling, as in
Oh, did I nod off, dear? Did I miss anything?
Mysterious, as in
I've got to take a leak; tell me what I missed. Want me to pick up some popcorn while I'm out there?

And for the next ninety-four minutes of running time, we have the cinematic equivalent of Gerald Ford's presidency. Nothing of consequence happens.

Here is a sixteen—seventeen million dollar film that functions as a perfect soporific. It isn't even bad enough to be a howler, bad enough to spark vituperation, bad enough to become a cult favorite for those who dote on turkeys. It is just lugubrious. Somnolent. Derivative. Empty. Yes, that's just what it is: empty calories. Not even interesting junk food. No spice, no jump, not even stupid enough to provide uncooked meat for the disputatious critic to amuse his basest instincts. It is, in the vernacular of my people, a lox. It doth but lie there and rot from the head down.

With the arrogance of the
arriviste
, above the credits we are told this is A GRAHAM BAKER FILM. Now, if that fails to bring you to your feet with an admixture of awe and gladness, it is because you probably never heard of Graham Baker. His previous credits are the classic draughts from the Waters of Lethe titled
The Final Conflict
and
Impulse
. If we are to judge Mr. Baker's potential from this trio of bow-wows, I suggest that the degree of directorial scintillance contained in the batch prepares Mr. Baker for a world-class dive into oblivion.

Or a return to directing television commercials in England.

As for the acting, both Terence Stamp and Mandy Patinkin are wasted, performing like shamble-ons excised from a rough cut of
Night of the Living Dead
; James Caan looks old, tired, puffy and lackadaisical, employing the same thespic shrugs and tics we've seen him substitute for character insight before and since his outstanding performances in
The Gambler
(1974) and
Thief
(1981); and everyone else appears to be as one with Jay McInerney's "brigades of tiny Bolivian soldiers" waiting for the Bolivian Marching Powder of cocaine to galvanize them into frenetic action.

Not only is the film slow as the erosion of mountains, but it is slovenly in its basic logic and in its tiniest details: the latter exemplified by Caan returning to his home, trying to find something to eat, eyeing the detritus of a dozen fast food banquets littering the kitchen, living room, bedroom, a vast terrain of garbage . . . and not one cockroach in sight. Trust me on this one, folks. I live in Los Angeles, and while we aren't the cockroach paradise of, say, New Orleans or New York City, it is impossible to leave that much crap lying about in the heat without sounding an orthopterous klaxon that would draw
Blattidae
from as far away as Pomona. But pristine is Caan's pad, nary an ant—black, red or white—as far as the camera eye can see.

The former is exemplified by the simplistic treatment of three hundred thousand
aliens from outer space
being plopped into the middle of Los Angeles. There is virtually
no
social or physical alteration in the makeup of the city as we know it today. Everyone dresses the same, talks the same, acts the same, and for a budget of 16–17 million, the minutiae of a major new immigrant population is nil. The only one that sticks in my memory is the repellent concept of fast food burger joints serving "raw beaver" (with the fur still on it) alongside the fishwich and fries.

Consider, if you will, the changes in Miami with the arrival of far fewer Cuban refugees. The changes in Los Angeles, San Diego and Orange County with the arrival of Laotians, Cambodians, Koreans and Vietnamese. The changes in New York that altered even that endlessly mutable melting pot at each new wave of Irish, Middle Europeans, Jews, Puerto Ricans. If you have no sense of history to point out the ludicrousness of what
Alien Nation
substitutes for solid sociological ideation, just compare what I've described here with the society portrayed in
Blade Runner
.

And the worst part of this imbecile determination to discount even the least venturous attempt at extrapolation, is that for 94 minutes we have
nothing original to look at
.

Coupled with that boring, overexposed, overfamiliar Los Angeles setting we've wearily endured through ten thousand flicks, is a sound mix of intrusive rock so excruciating that we cannot decipher the dialogue, which may be, on further consideration, a blessing in disguise. Ah, yes, disguise.

Which brings us to disguise.

This is nothing more than the same old buddy-movie formula with dopey latex masks. Mask disguises for a good ole boys liaison.

And here is where I draw back my Lou Groza toe to dropkick Rock O'Bannon's ass.

The great scenarist Ring Lardner, Jr.—
The Cross of Lorraine; M
^*
A
^*
S
^*
H; Woman of the Year;
and
Tomorrow, The World
just to name a few—once opined: "No good film was ever made from a poor script." So, though I have made it clear that affection and respect inform my opinions of Rockne S. O'Bannon, even as I accept about one-third of the blame for that long-ago awfulness I wrote when a newcomer to the screenplay, Rock must accept the initial blame for
Alien Nation
. It's a commercially cynical idea. Rock sat there one day (I was a fly on the wall . . . this is how it happened . . . trust me) and suddenly he said aloud, "Hey, what a great obvious idea for a thriller! A cop-buddy movie with a human being and an alien! Hell, we can cast Patrick Swayze as the human and put John Candy in a funny suit for the alien! Hot shit, this'll make me a fortune!"

And he took it to market; and because he is dealing with the sort of people I noted a few columns ago, the sort who wanted to make a tv special: "Let's do
The Wiz . . .
white!" he had no trouble selling the project. Before Gale Anne Hurd picked up on it at 20th in April of 1987, Warners and Paramount wanted it. It was a "hot" idea. Like Pete Hyams standing in front of Alan Ladd, Jr. and getting a deal to make
Outland
when he suggested, "Let's do
High Noon
in outer space." Rock O'Bannon is a cagey guy, a canny assayer of the lowered expectations, petty pretensions, and cultural illiteracy of the New Executives who run this industry. Rock is (with one important difference) the very model of the kind of writer who is hitting it big in Hollywood these days. He has his eye not on the sparrow, but on the box office. He spots, early on, the trend for the season; and he boils it down to basics; and he pushes a simplistic version of that trendy idea couched in derivative terms that make the New Execs comfortable. He understands, as do his brethren who write films like
The Hidden
and
Robocop
and the
Nightmare on Elm Street
features, that he is dealing with men and women who are not only ignorant, but who are arrogant about their lack of knowledge. He understands that for such people, the daring offbeat original ideas are anathema. He knows on a primal level the truth of Ellison's First Law of Movie Marketing: