Harlan Ellison's Watching

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/October 1985

  INSTALLMENT 13:

  In Which Numerous Ends (Loose) Are Tied Up; Some In The Configuration Of A Noose (Hangman's)

  As I write this, another film murder is in progress.

  I leave for London and Scotland tomorrow (5 July), and this column is my final chore in front of the typewriter. When these words get to your eyes, I'll have returned to Los Angeles; I'll have sat in William Friedkin's back pocket as he directed my teleplay adaptation of Stephen King's "Gramma" for The Twilight Zone; I'll have voyaged far to Australia Incognita and will have returned with or without a Hugo for non-fiction; I'll have watched with pleasure the Friday-night-in-September premiere of CBS-TV's revival of TZ . . . and the murder will be merely another footnote in the history of the cinema.

  Much will have happened between this writing and your reading of what I'm about to set down.

  And were it not that your faithful hawkshaw got the wind up, this killing of a movie—like the crib-death of Dune, about which I wrote two columns recently—would be yet another perfect crime. Nor would you be apprised of how willingly you were accomplices.

  Much of life will have transpired and in the impression of humanity's footsteps left behind, no one will notice, I fear, that another butterfly has been crushed underfoot. That's poetry.

  Last time, I urged you to rush out and see Return to Oz (Walt Disney Productions). I managed to slip that appeal into the column when the galleys were returned for proofing because I'd gotten the wind up, had begun to smell the déjà vu of what had befallen Dune, and I didn't want the murder to go unnoticed because of a delay in getting the word to you, resulting from this magazine's monthly publication schedule. I wanted you to catch this film before it vanished from your local theaters.

  And it did vanish, didn't it? Quickly.

  I have given you the date on which I'm typing these words, because the months between this date and your reading of the words have not yet passed. So what I write is, at this moment, prediction. As you read the words, it's history. If I smelled the charnel house smell, and am not merely a victim of paranoid conspiracy-theory, then you will know what I'm about to say has the ring of truth in it; otherwise how could I have predicted it?

  If the events of the intervening months do not back up my assertions, then I'm dyin' cuz I'm lyin'.

  I began to smell the odor of filmic crib-death even before Return to Oz opened; and I implored you to ignore the witless and intransigent negative reviews that were everywhere to be found; to treat yourselves to an afternoon or evening basking in the marvels of this wondrous fantasy while you could.

  Because if my snoot was accurate, if you put off the going to see it, Return to Oz would be gone; and who knows how it'll play on videocassette or cable television a year from now?

  In the trade, they call it "dumping."

  I call it crib-death. Strangling the infant before it gets its legs through word-of-mouth. (In the trade, mixed metaphor works. In the trade, everything works, including executives who've been exposed as embezzlers, charlatans, wrong-guessers, idiots and knaves.)

  If you followed the reasoning I put forth in the matter of Dune's early demise, you were no doubt left with one nagging question: why (if Ellison's correct that Universal sabotaged its own release) did a major film company program the catastrophic failure of a forty million dollar epic that should have made its year-end p&I sheets vibrate with profits?

  I had the same question.

  It was only recently that an Informed Source gave me the answer. (Informed, but also, necessarily, Unnamed. Bamboo slivers under the fingernails cannot drag the name from me. You'll just have to take my word for it that said Source exists, oh yes said Source do. Everybody in the trade talks, and many there be who will summon up the cojones to blow the whistle; but swift and ugly reprisal is a fact of life in the trade, and I see no reason why an act of honesty should result in someone's losing his/her livelihood. Rather would I have you consider what I say with skepticism.)

  My Unnamed Source called to tell me that the budget on Dune was not, as I and every other American journalist reported, a mere forty million dollars. It was more than $75,000,000!

  So unless Dune had been a runaway hit on the level of Beverly Hills Cop or Rambo there was absolutely no way Universal was going to come out on the black side of the ledger.

  It was very likely going to be a loser, but it need not have been such a loser. Sabotage from within, it now seems obvious, was the final nail in Dune's coffin. But why? The answer lies in the power politics and job-hopping of studio executives.

  When I expressed disbelief at such a berserk answer, my Informed Source chided me for naïvete. It is not, however, wide-eyed innocence on my part that forces me to express doubts. It is the canker on the rose called libel. In Synopsis of the Law of Libel and the Right of Privacy, by Bruce W. Sanford, a pamphlet for journalists published by Scripps-Howard Newspapers, among the words and phrases "red flagged" as containing potentially actionable potency, we find the following: altered records, blackguard, cheats, corruption, coward, crook, fraud, liar, moral delinquency, rascal, scam, sold out, unethical and villain. Also on the list are booze hound, deadbeat, fawning sycophant, groveling office seeker, herpes, Ku Klux Klan and unmarried mother. But those have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Just thought I'd get them in for a little cheap sensationalism.

  So what I will report here is carefully written. Facts and some philosophy. The linkages are yours to make.

  Success and failure in the film colony are adduced on the basis of one's most recent production. Even an inept booze hound or fawning sycophant affiliated with a hit movie glows with the golden radiance of its success. A set designer or actor who did a splendid job in connection with a flop gets tarred with the same brush as the fools who came a cropper. Take director Martin Brest, as an example. Marty's first film after creating the brilliant Hot Tomorrows while still in attendance at the American Film Institute, was Going in Style (1979), which did not do well. Marty could not get arrested (as it is warmly phrased in the trade) for three years. That's a long time to go without a job if you're a young director. Then he made Beverly Hills Cop in 1984. We all know how big that film hit. (Which was a fluke that Destiny had in its rucksack for Marty, who deserves all good breaks, for he is an enormously talented artist; a fluke in that Stallone was originally set to play the lead, backed out for whatever reasons, and was replaced by Eddie Murphy, who can do no wrong onscreen.)

  But now, Martin Brest is the hottest director in Hollywood.

  And everyone with the film at Paramount—including then-studio heads Michael Eisner and Barry Diller—got hot with him. So they moved over to Disney. But that gets relevant later in this essay.

  The point being that executives hop from studio to studio on the basis of how good they looked when they left. And frequently that has more to do with what happens to a movie than how good or bad the film is intrinsically. So a fact of film industry life that you've never known till now is the truth that an exec wanting to look to his shareholders as one who saved a studio in decline, necessarily tries to make his/her predecessors look bad. The worse they look, the better he/she looks if/when the new exec presents a bountiful p&l sheet at year-end.

  I present the preceding as philosophy only.

  Here is a fact. In 1982, when Universal picked up Dune for distribution from Dino De Laurentiis, the administration of that film mill was under the aegis of President Bob Rehme (now Pres./CEO of New World Pictures). But by 1984 when Dune was released, Rehme was gone and Frank Price (who had hopped over from Columbia) was President of Universal.

  As I recounted in detail in installments 9 and 10 of this column, what happened to Dune bore all the earmarks of a classic "dumping" scenario. That's how it looked to those of us who write about the film industry, and the conclusion is borne out by my Unnamed Source. Change of administration, a disaster credited to Rehme, and the new Priests of the Blac
k Tower can only move upward, appearancewise, even if the next p&l is only adequate.

  The same is happening to Return to Oz as I write this.

  The film is being orphaned by Disney's new management, the Eisner-Diller combine. That's how it looks to me.

  The evidence is out there for you to integrate, if you look even casually: no television advertising to speak of; small newsprint ads; few positive quotes; the film yanked from movie houses after a short run. And only now, several weeks after its premiere, are talk-show interviews with principals from the film being booked. The film came in around $32 million. The studio cut out most of the publicity back in March, three months before Return to Oz was scheduled to open; and it had an opening week advertising budget of approximately $4–4.5 million. This is extremely low for a major release. A typical figure for a comparable film would be $7–10 million, aided by heavy saturation on the talk-show circuit. Those are facts; evidence.

  But here's what was going on behind the scenes.

  The old Disney marketing department was essentially in place from the start of production late in 1983, until early in 1985. Then the new studio management of Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg started playing a direct hand.

  Barry Glasser, the Vice President of Publicity, was unhappy and left the studio in March for a production development position with a Japanese animation company, TMS.

  Frequently, studios hire outside publicity and advertising agencies to work with the in-house marketing department. The new management of Disney hired Young & Rubicam in February or March of 1985. Gordon Weaver, a former head of Paramount's marketing division and head of Y&R Entertainment, was given charge of the Return to Oz account. Unlike most agency/studio relationships, the agency started giving the orders to the studio personnel, leaving the marketing department in an unusual and untenable position. Barry Lorie, head of marketing for Disney, was so undercut by these goings-on that he was left with virtually little authority. It is common knowledge that Lorie bided his time, taking what was dished out, until an opportunity to hop presented itself. (It was announced during the last week in June that he would be leaving Disney due to "philosophical differences with the new management of the studio.")

  If one were to examine the facts, the evidence, and consider the modus operandi of dumping in the trade, one might feel that the situation as regards Return to Oz is philosophically consistent with historical precedent. I think that is a safe legal locution.

  It is not enough to say, "Well, the critics hated the movie," because audiences seem to love it; and hideous films of virtually no value are hyped in huge measure to get the potential audience's appetite whetted. But nothing much was done for Oz, and now the new Disney administration can say, "Well, it isn't reaching the market we thought would welcome it. We have to cut our losses." Orphaned. Dumped. Murdered.

  And as producer Gary Kurtz knows, and as he told Disney, it is important to remember that the 1939 Wizard of Oz was a box-office disaster, and remained so until it was purchased for television in the early '60s, from which time it has been regarded by the general public (not just us enthusiasts) as a "classic." But such need not have been the case with Return to Oz. It is a remarkable piece of movie making, true to the Baum canon, and worthy of being successful.

  So we must ask the question, how did Eisner know Return to Oz wouldn't reach its audience back in February or March, long before it opened? Because that is when the advertising budget was cut and helter-skelter was introduced as the standard operating procedure. Unless he possesses a clairvoyance that ought to be scrutinized by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (3151 Bailey Avenue; Buffalo, New York 14215; publishers of The Skeptical Inquirer; an organization and a magazine you should support if you, as I, despise all the obscurantism and illogic from Creationism to Astrology that pollutes our world), one of the few rational explanations is that dumping has occurred.

  If there is another rationale that can fit in with the evidence, this column is anxiously waiting to publish such an explanation. From Paramount. From Disney. From anyone who feels compelled to let us know that the world is not what our intellect tells us it is.

  Until that time, it saddens me to have to advise those of you who went for the okeydoke that Return to Oz was a stinker, that you have been willing accomplices to the murder of a piece of cinematic delight.

  And how does it make you feel to be one of those P. T. Barnum was referring to when he said . . . aw, shucks, you know.

  The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction/November 1985

  INSTALLMENT 14:

  In Which We Sail To The Edge Of The World And Confront The Abyss, Having Run Out Of Steam

  As fit subject matter for motion pictures, science fiction and fantasy are a pair of dead ducks. We have reached cul-de-sac and the curtain is about to be rung down. There has been a power failure in Metropolis; the Thing has been diced, sliced, riced in a trice and dumped into a pot of goulash; the Forbidden Planet has been subdivided for condos and a mini-mall; things to come has gone and went; and green cards have been denied Kharis, Munchausen, Gort and Lawrence Talbot.

  What I'm telling you here is, they're dead, Jim, dead!

  The trouble with this parrot is that this parrot is dead. I know a dead parrot when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now. It's stone dead. I took the liberty of examining this parrot and I discovered that the only reason it had been sitting on its perch in the first place was that it had been nailed there. And don't tell me that of course it was nailed there because if it hadn't been nailed it would have muscled up to the bars and voom! This parrot wouldn't voom! if you put four thousand volts through it. It's bleedin' demised. It's not pining for the fjords, it's passed on. This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It's expired, and gone to see its Maker. This is a late parrot. It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace. If it hadn't been nailed to the perch it would be pushin' up the daisies. It's rung down the curtain and joined the Choir Invisible. This is an ex-parrot!

  (And no, we haven't any gouda, muenster or red leicester.)

  Man and boy, I've been looking at fantasy movies since 1940 when, at age six, I saw the first re-release of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs at the Utopia Theater in Painesville, Ohio; and I'm here to tell you that in a mere forty-five years the filmic genres of fantasy and science fiction have been wrung dry, have sprouted moss and ugly little white squiggly things, and are no more. Gone. Done. Finis. Kaput. As empty as a line of sappy dialogue emerging from Jennifer Beals's mouth.

  This is one of those pronunciamentos one lives to regret at leisure. (My last one, "the mad dogs have kneed us in the groin," has hounded me, er, make that dogged my footsteps, uh, make that blighted my life . . . since my teens.) The sort of I don't know fer sure, Gen'ral Custer, but they look friendly to me one has thrown up to him ten years later, at the peak of a new golden age of cinema fantasy. Nonetheless, I have been going to the pictures a lot of late, and the scent of mold is in my nostrils. I have witnessed the best the film industry has had to offer from the well of sf/fantasy ideas, and I am here to tell you—despite the risks to my otherwise impeccable reputation—that if this is what passes for the best and brightest, then the end of the road is before us, and sf/fantasy has nothing more to offer.

  All in the same month I have seen the latest variations on Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Wolf Man, not to mention a lamebrain time travel picture that seems about to pass Rambo: First Blood, Part II as the most popular flick of the summer. I speak of Back to the Future, of course. A film that has received almost unanimous salivations of delight from within and without the field. Kids love it, adults love it, sailors on leave off the Aisukuriimu Maru love it; intellectuals love it, horny-handed sons of toil love it, Manchester chimney sweeps love it; young women in their teens love it, grizzled pulp magazine sf writers love it, defecating Russian ballerinas love it. So what's not to love? I'll tell you what's not to love!

  (Back to Frankie, Drac
and Fangface in a moment, but permit me to savage the sf end of this argument first.)

  Understand this:

  Time is like a river flowing endlessly through the universe. Circa 500 B.C.: Heraclitus, the early Greek philosopher (there were no late Greek philosophers), lying around the agora like all the other unemployed philosophers, just idly thinking deep thoughts and providing a helipad for flies, said it for the first time, as best we know: Time is like a river, flowing endlessly through the universe.

  And if you poled your flatboat in that river, you might fight your way against the current and travel upstream into the past. Or go with the flow and rush into the future.

  This was in a less cynical time before toxic waste dumping and pollution filled the waterway of Chronus with the detritus of empty hours, wasted minutes, years of repetition and time that has been killed. But I digress.

  Of all the pure fantasy plot devices, time travel is the second most prevalent in the genre of speculative fiction—right in there chugging along, trying harder because it's number two, close behind invasion-of-Earth-by-moist-things movies. (And make no mistake, it is fantasy, not science fiction. I don't want to argue about this. As that good and dear Isaac has told us: "Science fiction writers have dreamed of finding some device that would make travel along the temporal dimension to be as easily controlled as along any of the three spacial dimensions. First to do so was H. G. Wells in 1895 in his novel The Time Machine. Many [including myself] have used time machines since, but such a device is not practical and, as far as science now knows, will never be. Time travel, in the sense of moving freely backward and forward at will along the temporal dimension, is impossible.")