These, and the System itself, are the great killers. They force a stultifying alienation between writer and director, between director and producer, between all the various creative levels that should pull together as a unit to produce work of at least some quality. But the doors are shut to the writer after the script comes in, and the doors shut on the director when his real and vital presence is needed after shooting and initial assemblage of footage. A first cut by a director is usually insufficient but that is where the director is excluded. And the film is turned over to businessmen.
It is the System, the entire structure of employee/employer relationships in television, that keeps the creators apart. The directors are compelled to believe the writers are merely sketch artists, setting down a diagram from which the director must urge sense and order; the writer is made paranoiacally aware of how useless he is after he’s written the words; the actors feel contempt for the writers or an even unhealthier awe; the producers look on the entire pack as children who are unaware of the great stakes for which everyone is playing. And the trade unions bleed every dollar out of the budget and seldom proffer more than the same featherbedding ineptitude and by-rote techniques that have helped sink the industry to a new low of economic depression. And then they have the audacity to bleat about runaway production, the slimy parasites!
This is the System within which my script was produced. I was a fool to think it could turn out any way but badly. Given the System, and given the men and women who rationalize working within it—not criminals, just pawns—it was doomed from the words FADE IN. And I was imbecilic to think I had a chance.
And here is what they did to it:
•The solarization techniques asked for in the “memory shots” would have cost dollars for opticals, so they were filmed as straight camera work, and thus lost all effectiveness in establishing Zalman King’s memories of the girl he once loved. They now flash so quickly and impotently they bear all the emotional load of a Delsey Tissue scrim-&-gauze commercial of Young Innocents loping in slow motion through a fog-bedewed forest.
•Judy Pace’s lines were cut to the bone with such brutality that once again she looks like a talentless stick, which is far from the case. If Ms. Pace doesn’t sue Paramount for systematically making her look useless and tongue-tied through an entire season, then she must cop to being a masochist.
•More about Lee J. Cobb later, but because of his refusal to say anything of importance on camera, he cut the heart out of every scene of which he was a part. I’ll give you two f’rinstances. In a conversation about women’s lib, using King Kong as a comedic symbol of male chauvinism, in which Cobb is supposed to say, “Next you’ll be saying Fay Wray was representative of Women’s Liberation because she didn’t wear a bra,” he chose to leave off the last six words, thereby rendering the sentence meaningless and less funny than it was to start with. A few speeches later on, he caps the lighthearted badinage with this speech: “In point of fact, I submit that poor simian is a symbol of man’s never-ending search for a little true love, a good woman…and a thirty-foot banana.” Naturally, Cobb left off the banana remark. An actor with the pompous self-importance of a martinet. More of this man in a bit.
•Zalman King is a good friend, and I hurt to have to put him down in any way because truly, in a show where bright moments were few and far between, he was the only really outstanding element. But he is as guilty of muddling lines as the worst amateur. He had difficulty pronouncing the name Hallie, and so everyone had to call her Hay-ley. A small matter, you say. Well, perhaps. But let’s move on.
•All conflict between Cobb and King was watered down through every scene in which the older man should be angry with Zal for going out on a limb for an obvious wrongo. It was an attempt to humanize a character that Cobb had made sterile and officious throughout the series. He succeeded in blunting the attempt once more.
•The scene in which Pat and Zal gather together his goods to hock them was rewritten by myself to feature Phillip Clark as Chris Blake. I had serious misgivings about Clark when I went into the rewrite, because he was a character added late in the season to bring a “white middle class” image to a show dominated by a black and a Jew. But he was the only actor in the show who gave my words a chance without rewriting them out of his mouth. For which my thanks, Mr. Clark, and my apologies. It’s a shame that scene couldn’t have been shown as it was rewritten. It would have given you some decent footage to lay on another producer. But they cut you into a third of what you were there, Mr. Clark, and I’m sorry, baby, but you wound up being the token WASP on the series.
•The censors got to the scene where Phil, Judy, and Zal have been waiting at the police station overnight. I wrote it with Judy lying on a bench covered by her coat, her feet in Zal’s lap. God forbid a black woman should have her feet in a white boy’s lap. They were all sitting up asleep in separate chairs. Another small item? Sure. But are they beginning to add up?
•The sequence in which Zal tells the cop to shut up bumrapping Hallie? It went. Everyone knows you don’t talk back to a cop.
•Same scene. Zal is supposed to be looking down the corridor of the jail release area, straight at Hallie as she comes out, and not recognize her because she’s been on speed for three years. Lousy direction had him looking at the cop, so the impact of Zal’s line, “Where is she?” and the cop’s response, “That’s her, buddy,” become pointless. He just wasn’t looking in the right direction. Which makes it dandy when you’re trying to hit a point about what heavy speeding does to someone you’ve known and loved, someone you’ve remembered as sweet and innocent.
That’s by no means all the corruptions, and I’ve only taken you through act 1. Care to go on a little further?
•Act 2. The entire lead-in scene in which Hallie gives a phony address and is apprised of arraignment date was cut, thereby making Zal’s locating of her later weirdly implausible. All through the script vital information was omitted, making many of Zal’s acts seem inspired by spirit messages or a mutant sixth sense.
•I wrote the part of Hallie Benda specifically for Susan Strasberg, because I respect her talent and I thought she was physically perfect for the part. But again lousy direction screwed me. Miss Strasberg tends to rant. She tears her hair and thrashes about. By not holding her in check, the director, Jud Taylor, permitted her to give one of the most overblown, hysterical, and phony performances I’ve ever witnessed. It also took twice as long to get through what was intended originally as a low-key, touching, and subtle portrait of a girl gone psychotic from speed and lousy living. It is obvious from the authentic makeup that Hallie/Susan is heavy behind drugs, yet Zal (who is supposed to be a hip, with-it, Now Generation attorney working among students and the underprivileged) keeps asking her if she’s on drugs. Jeeeeezus! The fault in this scene lies not with Miss Strasberg, who saw an opportunity to emote, but with Jud, who couldn’t handle her.
•The scene in the diner. As it ends, Zal finds himself without enough money to pay for the coffee and pie. He has hocked everything to get Susan out of the slammer. He’s eleven cents and a tip short. The waitress sees he’s beaten and unhappy, and she says okay, bring it in next time. Zal looks at her, for this simple touch of humanity, and trying to say thank you, says “It was very good pie.” A little touch. A moment. A beat. The editing sliced it out. And that brings us to the heart of what fucked this show. The editing. And I can’t even blame Fred Baratta, the editor at Paramount, because he’s a good editor. He did the first assemblage of footage, but it was first cut by Jud and the producer, Herbert Hirschman. And after Herb left, and Jud was gone, Jim McAdams, the associate producer, had to complete the work. But by that time it was too late. It was in tatters.
I’ll tell you all about that next week, when I finish this death rattle.
There are four more columns before I vanish forever from the juju box, and they’re pretty good columns, but for posterity, troops, this is my final statement of the torture chamber tv has beco
me. So come back next week for the dying words of a broken man.
Your friend and mine, Ellison the Fool.
99: 19 MARCH 71
THE GREAT RAPE: Part Two
Where was I? Oh, yeah, that’s right. How I got raped when my script for The Young Lawyers came to thalidomide fruition. It’s been a helluvan interesting week since the first half of this column appeared. I think my rape has left me with a dose of economic clap. Bad vibes from all over the Industry. I’m not playing the game, friends. I’m not being a good little boy and maintaining the gentleman’s agreement which requires I possess a nobility none of my assailants seem to display. Jud Taylor, the director of “The Whimper of Whipped Dogs,” says I’ve betrayed confidences by talking about what went on during the shooting of the segment. No, that’s wrong. I have very carefully spoken of nothing that went on down at Paramount that I promised not to mention when it was possible I might be writing up the encounter for TV Guide. But first of all, I didn’t do the article for that magazine, and I never promised not to speak my piece here in this column: they were two different ball games. But I haven’t, in any case. I try very hard to keep my promises and act ethically. But why all the secrecy, Jud? Why can’t I mention what it’s like to work with Paramount and Lee J. Cobb and you? Why the fear that someone will break the code of silence and forget to be polite and finally, once and for all, attack those who’ve fucked-over the Work? Because in the final analysis it isn’t my injured feelings, or your justifiable anger at me for lashing out: it’s the Work, man. The piece of what-might-have-been-art but is now only bullshit. And the Work speaks for itself. It speaks in the voices of (for instance) students at San Fernando Valley State College, where I spoke last Friday.
I was asked to come in to a couple of media classes and rap about what happened to the show. The students were given the script to read and were required to watch the show. I took a hand vote on reactions to the segment, and in the first class thirty-eight out of forty who’d seen it thought it stank on ice. In the second class, nine out of forty liked it. (A subsequent hand vote of how many who’d liked it had also liked Love Story raised the hands of four of the nine.)
I had to stand there for the two hours and listen to intelligent and perceptive kids rake me over for a disastrous show, and man, did I look stupid saying it wasn’t all my fault.
But Jud (and others) expect me to remain silent. They have told me I’m a badmouth. Jud said I betrayed him by (a) not being on the set for the last three days of shooting and (b) speaking out my anger when I’d promised to be silent. Well, (a) is sheer flummery because—as Jud well knows—the show’s shooting schedule was revamped, lapping over onto days when I had a lecture gig in Maine, a gig that had been set up for six months prior to the shooting. And (b) I’m still handling here: I haven’t revealed any confidences I picked up on the set, even those revealed by ABC in a press release dated 22 February 71 headlined “YOUNG LAWYERS” SCRIPTER FIGHTS FOR HIS WRITES. I’ve very carefully stepped around those privileged communications in these columns. Jud, you can believe that or not. What I’ll say in this concluding installment will only be comment on what showed up on the screen, compared with the script. And that is open news.
But I’ve digressed, to answer Jud. Because I can’t conceive of him—as I said last week—as a villain. Jud is a victim, just like me. And so is Herb Hirschman, the producer. And so is Fred Baratta, the editor. And Jim McAdams, the associate producer; and Jack Guss, the story editor; and Susan Strasberg and Lee J. Cobb and Zalman King, who performed in the play. Victims all. Sure they are. There are no villains, gang.
Which reminds me of a story.
A parallel experience I had about five years ago when Eye, the now-defunct Hearst magazine, asked me to do a piece on Star Trek.
In discussions with the producer of the show, Gene Roddenberry, he mentioned—almost as an aside—that, when they’d first shot the pilot for Star Trek, someone at NBC had decided Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) shouldn’t have pointed ears or Mefisto eyebrows and there had been a struggle to keep those physical differences between an Earthman and a Vulcanian. When I pursued the item, I ran into a brick wall. Everyone at NBC here on the Coast denied any such thing. According to them—and this was at all levels of executive responsibility—that was an outright lie. According to them, everyone had adored Spock’s alienness from the outset. So I passed over that bit of minutiae and carried on my research for the piece.
But someone slipped up, and in a batch of publicity material I was sent to aid me in preparing the article, I found a brochure on the series that had been prepared by NBC for its local affiliates, and in every photo, including the clear close-up head shots of Nimoy, the ears and eyebrows had been airbrushed into normal homo sapien format. So I had a piece of concrete evidence that had slipped past, and I took it back to New York and laid it on the desk of the head of programming and said, “Now what do you say?”
He immediately got on the phone and started calling around through NBC’s great tower, and could find no one, not one single living soul who would cop to the responsibility. I found it difficult to understand how the man in charge could know nothing about it, but even more incomprehensible was that nowhere down through all the layers of honchos who dabble their fingers in every aspect of a show was there anybody who’d had a hand in it. But perhaps, like seasoned veterans, they knew enough to stay out of the line of fire.
Finally, they got their Lieutenant Calley. They found some poor schlep of an artist in the graphics department who remembered having actually done the physical airbrushing. He was offered to me as a scapegoat, and when I insisted he must have had instructions from somewhere, everyone turned Little Orphan Annie eyeballs on me. I think they fired the poor bastard. I don’t really know.
But what it proved to me was that the Industry is a snake without a head. It knows not what it does. And the Work gets masticated in the chippers. And there are no villains.
Get the parallel?
Jud is not a villain, and I’m not a villain, and Zalman isn’t a villain, and good, sweet, easy-to-work-with Lee J. Cobb is not a villain. I’m just a troublemaker.
Well, the trouble has finally materialized for me. I was up for a job at Paramount last week, and the producer in question was hot to have me work for him. Until Thursday when the paper came out. On Friday he called my agent and said let’s forget it with Ellison. That’s one.
On Sunday I finally got through to Jud and we talked. He said I betrayed him. That’s two.
Zalman is pissed off that a friend could fault his performance. That’s three.
Monday morning I received another of the many anonymous phone calls that brighten my days. “You won’t be working much, you little bastard,” my caller said. “What the hell makes you think you can get away with calling the unions crooks?” He sounded angry. Maybe a grip or a gaffer or a propman. Who knows? That’s four.
My mother in Miami Beach loved the show. That’s five.
I’m waiting to hear from Miss Strasberg and Mr. Cobb.
But to pick up where I left off last week, enumerating the evils of that silly segment…
We were into act 2 when I left off. The diner scene in which Susan Strasberg chewed the scenery to indicate depth of emotion.
I’ve had an argument with a young actress about this phase of my complaint. She is willing to accept that the producer, director, and everyone else connected with the show are monsters, but she contends Miss Strasberg was well within her thespic rights in thrashing and bellowing, because “that’s the way she interpreted the character.”
I want to kill when I hear that from an actor or actress. It is a catchall excuse for not understanding the character as written. The script was highly specific about the tone of Hallie’s sickness. It never indicated raving lunacy. It was a quiet, out-of-phase spaciness I was after. And it fit the context of the show, the interrelations with Zal and everyone else in the script. Interpreting is one thing, completely altering is quite ano
ther. Actors and actresses, it seems to me, have been so preconditioned by the blunt and oversimplified characterizations that pass for acting on tv, that they almost instinctively go for the on-the-button reading. When one sees a Hal Holbrook or a Geraldine Page reach for a subsurface beauty of truthful characterization, it is to stun one. We see it so seldom, I no longer feel charitable enough to allow an actor to say, “I can’t read that line.” Bullshit! You’re an actor, find a way, godammit!
And though I understand Miss Strasberg did research to get the character of Hallie down, I contend she went to every source save the one that might have helped her: the author. For by selecting an incorrect psychological ambiance, she altered Hallie from a quiet psychotic to a raving psychopath with manic-depressive overtones. And that, friends, was not the character written for that script.
The entire scene in which Cobb persuades Zalman to cry was dropped.
In the scene with Phil Clark, where Zal says he’s let her go and will pick her up later for the arraignment, someone confused downers with speed. Though I don’t use, readers, I do know the differences between barbiturates and amphetamines. Apparently the change was made sometime early on, and I never caught it. That’s my error, and it is a serious one, because anyone who is into dope in any way, hearing that dilettante-doper mistake, would switch off the set with a grunt of anger. Bullshit! he’d say.