Stalking the Nightmare (27 page)

And while I make no brief for the reams and volumes of low-grade, moronic
Star Wars
imitation space opera hackwork that has turned this into the worst period in the history of sf, the genre is
not
predictable. Or at least it shouldn’t be.

(Though shit like
Battlestar Ponderosa
and Universale
Buck Rogers
seems to assure us that the steamroller mediocrity of tv can even trivialize sf, despite the built-in deterrents.)

A science fiction story has to have interior logic. It has to be consistent, even within the boundaries of its own extrapolative horizons. That’s irreducible in the parameters of what a sf story or teleplay must do, in order to get the reader or viewer to go along with it, without feeling conned or duped or lied to. Rigorous standards of plotting
must
be employed to win that willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the audience; it allows them to accept a fantastic premise.

How many sf movies have you seen
—Outland, Message From Space, Silent Running
are perfect awful examples—during which you recognized sophomoric inaccuracies that made you groan and feel cheated? Errors that first-year science students would not make: sound in a vacuum, people walking around on alien planets without filtration masks, clones that spring fully grown from fingernail parings, robots that act like midgets in metal suits.

Break that logical chain, dumb it up, accept the insulting myth that no one knows or cares if the special effects are spectacular enough, and the whole thing falls apart like Watergate testimony.

But the ad was only an early storm warning of what troubles were yet to befall me. The strike was called, and then began weeks of a kind of ghastly harassment I’d always thought was reserved for overblown melodramas about the Evils of Hollywood. Phone-calls at all hours, demanding I write the “bible” for the series. (A “bible” is industry shorthand for the
precis
of what the show will do, who the characters are, what directions storylines should take. In short, the blueprint from which individual segments are written. Without a bible, only the creator knows what the series is about.) Kline had no bible. He had nothing, at this point, but that seven-minute tape. With which item, plus my name and the name of Doug Trumbull—who, at that time had done the special effects for
2001
and had directed
Silent Running—
he’d been signed on as Executive Producer—Kline had—sans a contract with me!—sold this pipe dream to everyone in the Western World,

But I wouldn’t write the bible. I was on strike. Then began the threats. Followed by the intimidation, the bribes, the promises that they’d go forward with the idea without me, the veiled hints of scab writers who’d be hired to write their own version of the series … everything short of actually kidnapping me. Through these weeks—when even flights out of Los Angeles to secluded hideaways in the Michigan wilds and the northern California peninsula failed to deter the phone calls—I refused to write. It didn’t matter that the series might not get on the air, it didn’t matter that I’d lose a potload of money, the Guild was on strike in a noble cause and, besides, I didn’t much trust Mr. Kline and the anonymous voices that spoke to me in the wee hours of the night. And, contrary to popular belief, many television writers are men and women of ethic: they can be rented, but they can’t be bought.

I remember seeing a film of Clifford Odets’s
The Big Knife
when I was a young writer living in New York and lusting after fame in Hollywood. I remember seeing the unscrupulous Steiger and his minions applying pressure to a cracking Palance, to get him to sign a contract, and I remember smiling at the danger-filled melodramatics. During that period of pre-production on
The Starlost,
I ceased smiling.

The threats ranged from breaking my typing fingers to insuring I’d never work in the Industry again. The bribes ranged from $13,000 to be placed in an unnumbered Swiss bank account to this:

One afternoon before the strike, I’d been in Kline’s office. I’d been leafing through the
Players’ Directory,
the trade publications that list all actors and actresses, with photos. I’d commented idly that I found the person of one pictured young starlet quite appealing. Actually, what I’d said was that I’d sell my soul to get it on with her.

Now, weeks later, during my holdout and Kline’s attempts to get me to scab, I was pottering about my house, when the doorbell rang. I went to the door, opened it, and there stood the girl of my wanton daydreams. Bathed in sunlight, a palpable nimbus haloing that gorgeous face. I stood openmouthed, unable to even invite her in.

“I was in the neighborhood,” she said, entering the house with no assistance from me, “and I’ve heard so much about you, I decided just to come and say hello.”

She said hello. I said something unintelligible. (I have the same reaction when standing in front of Picasso’s
Guernica.
Otherworldly beauty has a way of turning my brains to prune-whip yogurt.) But it took only a few minutes of conversation to ascertain that yes, she knew Mr. Kline and, yes, she knew about the series, and …

I wish I could tell you I used her brutally and sent her back to where I assumed she had come from, but feminism has taken its toll and I merely asked her to split.

She split.

I couldn’t watch any TV that night. My eyes were too swollen from crying.

And the cajoling went on. Kline, of course, knew
nothing
about the girl, had never had anything to do with sending her over, would be affronted if anyone even
suggested
he had tried such a loathsome, demeaning trick. Hell, I’d be the
last
one to suggest it. Or maybe second from the last.

But howzabout the scab writer threat? Well …

At one point, representatives of Mr. Kline
did
bring in a scab. A non-union writer to whom they imparted a series of outright lies so he’d believe he was saving my bacon. When they approached well-known sf writer Robert Silverberg to write the bible, Bob asked them point-blank, “Why isn’t Harlan writing it?” They fum-fuh’ed and said, well, er, uh, he’s on strike. Bob said, “Would he want me to write this?” They knew he’d call me, and they told him no, I’d be angry. So he passed up some thousands of dollars, and they went elsewhere. And this being the kind of world it is, they found a taker.

I found out about the end-run, located the writer in a West LA hotel where they’d secreted him, writing madly through a weekend, and I convinced him he shouldn’t turn in the scab bible. To put the period to the final argument that Kline & Co. were not being honest, I called Kline from that hotel room while the other writer listened in on the bathroom extension phone. I asked Kline point-blank if other writers had been brought in to scab. He said no; he assured me they were helplessly waiting out the strike till I could bring the purity of my original vision to the project. I thanked him, hung up, and looked at the other writer who had just spent 72 hours beating his brains out writing a scab bible. “I rest my case.”

“Let’s go to the Writers Guild,” he said.

It drove Kline bananas. Everywhichway he turned, I was there, confounding his shabby attempts at circumventing an honest strike.

I’ll skip a little now. The details were ugly, but grow tedious in the retelling. It went on at hideous length, for weeks. Finally, Glen Warren in Toronto, at Kline’s urging, managed to get the Canadian writers guild, ACTRA, to accept that
The Starlost
was a wholly Canadian-produced series. They agreed that was the case, after much pressure was applied in ways I’m not legally permitted to explicate, and I was finally convinced I should go to work.

That was my next mistake.

They had been circulating copies of the scab bible with all of its erroneous material, and had even given names to the characters. When I finally produced the authentic bible, for which they’d been slavering so long, it confused everyone. They’d already begun building sets and fashioning materiel that had nothing to do with the show.

I was brought up to Toronto, to work with writers, and because the producing entity would get government subsidies if the show was clearly acceptable in terms of “Canadian content” (meaning the vast majority of writers, actors, directors and production staff had to be Canadian), I was ordered to assign script duties to Canadian TV writers.

I sat in the Four Seasons Motel in Toronto in company with a man named Bill Davidson, who had been hired as the Producer even though he knew nothing about science fiction and seemed thoroughly confused by the bible, and interviewed dozens of writers from
9 am
till
7 fm.

It is my feeling that one of the prime reasons for the artistic (and, it would seem, ratings) failure of
The Starlost
was the quality of the scripts. But it isn’t as simple a matter as saying the Canadians aren’t good writers, which is the cop-out Glen Warren and Kline used. Quite the opposite is true. The Canadian writers I met were bright, talented, and anxious as hell to write good shows.

Unfortunately, because of the nature of Canadian TV, which is vastly different from American TV, they had virtually no experience writing episodic drama as we know it. (“Train them,” lOine told me. “Train a cadre of writers?” I said, stunned. “Sure,” said Kline, who knew nothing about writing, “it isn’t hard.” No, not if I wanted to make it my life’s work.) And, for some peculiar reason, with only two exceptions I can think of, there are
no
Canadian sf writers.

But they were willing to work their hearts out to do good scripts. Sadly, they didn’t have the kind of freaky minds it takes to plot sf stories with originality and logic. There were the usual number of talking plant stories, giant ant stories, space pirate stories, westerns transplanted to alien environments, the Adam-&-Eve story, the after-the-Bomb story … the usual cliches people who haven’t been trained to think in fantasy terms conceive of as fresh and new.

Somehow, between Ben Bova and myself—Ben having been hired after I made it abundantly clear that I needed a specialist to work out the science properly—we came up with ten script ideas, and assigned them. We knew there would be massive rewrite problems, but I was willing to work with the writers, because they were energetic and anxious to learn. Unfortunately, such was not the case with Davidson and the moneymen from 20th, NBC, Glen Warren and the CTV, who were revamping and altering arrangements daily, in a sensational imitation of The Mad Caucus Race from
Alice in Wonderland.

I told the Powers in charge that I would need a good assistant story editor who could do rewrites, because I was not about to spend the rest of my natural life in a motel in Toronto, rewriting other people’s words. They began to scream. One gentleman came up to the room and banged his fist on the desk while I was packing to split, having received word a few hours earlier that my mother was very ill in Florida. He
told
me I was going to stay there in that room till the first drafts of the ten scripts came in. He
told
me that I was going to write the pilot script in that room and not leave till it was finished. He
told
me I could go home but would be back on such-and-such a date. He
told
me that was my schedule.

I
told
him if he didn’t get the hell out of my room I was going to clean his clock for him.

Then he went away, still screaming; Ben Bova returned to New York; I went to see my mother, established that she was somehow going to pull through, returned to Los Angeles; and sat down to finish writing the pilot script.

This was June already. Or was it July. Things blur. In any case, it was only weeks away from airdate debut, and they didn’t even have all the principals cast. Not to mention the special effects Trumbull had promised, which weren’t working out. The production staff under the confused direction of Davidson was doing
a
dandy impression of a Balinese Fire & Boat Drill; Kline was still madly dashing about selling something that didn’t exist to people who apparently didn’t care what they were buying; and I was banging my brains out writing “Phoenix Without Ashes,” the opening segment that was to limn the direction of the single most expensive production ever attempted in Canada.

I was also brought up on charges by the Writers Guild for writing during the strike.

I called Marty the agent and threatened him with disembowel-ment if he ever again called me to say, “Go see Bob Kline.” In my personal lexicon, the word “kline” could be found along with “eichmann,” “dog catcher,” “cancer” and “rerun.”

But I kept writing. I finished the script and got it off to Canada with only one interruption of note:

The name Norman Klenman had been tossed at me frequently in Toronto by the CTV representative and Davidson and, of course, by Kline and his minions. Klenman, I was told, was the answer to my script problems. He was a Canadian writer who had fled to the States for the larger money, and since he was actually a Canadian citizen who was familiar with writing American series TV, he would be acceptable to the TV board in Ottawa under the terms of “Canadian content” and yet would be a top-notch potential for scripts that need not be heavily rewritten. I was too dazed in Toronto to think about Klenman.