Now, listen, people, this ridiculous paranoia has got to come to an ass-grinding halt! I’m spending more time balming the subterranean fears of you readers than I am causing heartburn among The All-Potent Them.
First was that F-310 thing (the answer to which I now think I have, and in about three weeks I’ll do the wrap-up column: I’m waiting for just a few last reports). Then I got a letter from some lady who thought it was evil for the Freep to be running advertisements for the record album of Charlie Manson singing his songs, badly. (I wrote her a letter reminding her that Manson might well be guilty but he hadn’t even been brought to trial yet, and either way the poor bastard was entitled to advertise, which was sorta kinda what free speech was all about.) Now come two communiqués that tie together nicely and lead me to the subject of verisimilitude in tv scripts.
Now if you don’t know what verisimilitude is, you go right in to your mommy and ask her.
At least I can get back on to tv, thank god.
The first letter is from someone who signs himself or herself “Concerned Viewer.” His or her concern is pretty silly, what with all the heavyweight aggravations running amuck, and it all stemmed from my column of two weeks ago in which I was castigating a certain Guerdon Trueblood—a tv scenarist who is coming to represent more and more to me (and to Cleveland Amory, if we are to believe his TV Guide column of 28 March) the epitome of no talent in the craft of writing screenplays, the ultimate in hackmanship, the ne plus ultra, of what Bernard Wolfe calls “creative typing”—and I was castigating him for writing The Love War, a half-assed mini-movie that bastardized its science fiction content shamefully. In the column I said: “It always amazes me, the effrontery of writers ignorant of the most basic rules of sf writing, who have no conception of the almost fifty years of writing in the genre, whose temerity permits them to cobble up some pseudo-sf bullshit; they would never try to do a political teleplay without doing the research; they would never do a historical script without checking out the background…”
The italics, in red pencil, were Concerned Viewer’s. To which statement C.V. responded, somewhat paranoiacally, I feel, “Balls! Harlan baby—the lack of research on most tv scripts boggles the mind—and you know it—where’s the old Harlan who said most of his colleagues couldn’t write their way out of a pay toilet? Don’t sell out. For a small example, most professional ‘Western’ writers don’t know the difference between a Sheriff and a town or Federal Marshal.”
Now if any of you except C.V. see a “sellout” in my remarks, I’d appreciate your rationale for same. Let us understand something, troops. The phrase “sellout” is bandied around like a forty-dollar hooker at a fraternity stag party. It’s easy to accuse almost anybody of selling out if they try to see the other guy’s side of a problem. So let’s define it here and now, for purposes of future accusation in this column: to sell out means to desert your ethics or morality or honesty when the pressure is on, when you have something to lose, when the shit comes down; to stick it to your friends or sell out your beliefs for personal gain or aggrandizement; to do or say something opposed to your previous postures or statements because your skin or your rep or your pocketbook is in jeopardy. Now that’s what I think of as a sellout. Elia Kazan informing on fellow show-biz folk to HUAC and McCarthy in 1952 so he wouldn’t be tagged a Communist and could keep working—at their expense—is a sellout to me. The thirty-six motherfuckers who stood by and watched Kitty Genovese get knifed to death in a New York street without doing anything is by me a sellout. The members of The Lovin’ Spoonful who themselves were dopers (and that wasn’t all of them, remember), who narked on the hangers-on accompanying them on their road trip, to keep themselves from getting busted—that was a sellout. Turncoats and quislings of all stripes (mostly yellow) who desert their buddies when the nightsticks start to fall—those are sellouts.
Now. If you spot even the vaguest hint of a sellout in my remarks about tv writers, fuck you, you’re dense.
Which brings me back to C.V.’s hurling of my own words at me. Yes, I once said many of my tv writing colleagues couldn’t write their way out of a pay toilet and I don’t retract it…Mr. Trueblood is one such, a man whose abominable scribblings condemn him forever to some isolated potty. But the operative word there is many. I know dozens of extraordinarily talented writers working regularly in the medium—men like Mike Zagor, John Bloch, John D.F. Black, Richard Alan Simmons, Edward Anhalt, Tracy Keenan Wynn, Howard Rodman, Dorothy Fontana, Bob Specht, William Wood, Bobby Kaufman, Lorenzo Semple, and innumerable others—who anguish over their scripts, who take yeoman pride in their craft, who research the ass off their scripts. It is not writers such as these whom C.V. and I revile. It is the hack, the slapdasher, the whore-writer who takes nose from here and foot from there (but somehow always misses adding genitalia) and whomps up a Frankenstein monster of clichés and ridiculosities who gives all tv writers a bad name, and who contributes most of the dreck filling primetime.
(I feel particularly angry about them this week, to be quite frank; for the contract negotiations with the Producers’ Guild were presented to a membership vote of the WGAw recently, and once again the hacks and moneygrubbers had their way; rather than leaping on the fortuitousness of this being a “tight money” time to get some artistic control of our work, rather than merely to ask for higher minimum rates on scripts, the venal bastards gave the aye to contract demands that make us more bread but keep us once again in the menial position of hired hands without any say-so about what we can write and how we can write it. This constant reminder that many of my fellow-WGAw members conceive of themselves not as creators or artists but as literary bricklayers or septic tank drainers is a saddening thing, compelling me once again to the pay-toilet conclusion.)
Howsomever, C.V.’s overstatement that most tv scripts lack research is simply ignorant of the most obvious facts. Such as: how much research need one do to write a Bewitched segment or Bonanza or The Lucy Show or Green Acres or Mayberry RFD? And that’s the sort of common-knowledge show that fills up most of the primetime series. So, right off the bat we kill the word most. But further: many shows deal in areas where the form has become so totemized—Westerns and legal-eagle series spring most handily to mind—that the medium has become so much a part of the message it goes unheard. Open on a Dodge City street and without even closing any mental circuits we know approximately the year of the segment, approximately the social and emotional tenor of the people, the level of technology, the limit and range of story plots available to us. The lode has been pretty well mined by this time. So research is ingrained. Only specifics are needed, and not knowing the difference between a sheriff and a marshal ain’t that debilitating a drawback.
Now let me rush in here with a digression that will become a full examination in a few moments: I’m not defending not knowing the difference between a sheriff and a marshal. What I’m saying is that in this case it isn’t pivotally important. Bear the distinction in mind for a second; I’ll get back to it. Hopefully.
To tie off the derogatory utterance by C.V. that the “old Harlan Ellison” (a phrase I’ll thank you to forget as May 27 and my thirty-sixth birthday lumber toward me) is selling out for some unstated and nefarious reason, is excusing lack of research in some areas while reviling it in others, understand this: frequently a writer may spend days getting his facts right, only to have them altered for production or simplification values (?) by the producer, the director, or the network. The writer has to bear the rap for it, though. On Cimarron Strip I once saw a segment in which a female character who ran a restaurant served a cowhand “coffee and skittles.” I pointed out to the producer that “skittles” is an ancient Welsh bowling game, not a pastry. But they repeated the error in several later segments because someone had gotten it in his head that a skittle was a croissant or something, and it sounded correct. Any writer in whose show that error appeared would ever after have to bear the stigma of being a dunderhead. And sometimes, while this is not an excuse but merely an explanation, you simply don’t know you’ve made a mistake, and with the best of intentions, without any conscious attempt to fudge reality, a writer can err. It’s only, as they say, human.
Which brings me to the second letter.
Larry D. Farrell, a graduate student in bacteriology at UCLA, who holds “both Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in that field and expects to complete [his] Ph.D. in about six months” wrote as follows:
“Recently, I saw the first rerun (and hopefully, it will be the last) of ‘The Satan Bug’ in NBC’s Monday night movie. I counted no less than eighteen technical errors in this pseudo-scientific abortion, ranging from those which would be obvious to the dullest layman to those which would be detected only by someone more knowledgeable. I also vividly remember an episode of the ‘Man From U.N.C.L.E.’ series in which Percy Rodriguez, playing the role of a ‘scientist,’ supposedly identified a virus, which had been developed by our old friend Thrush, by a cursory examination of a ‘culture’ under a light microscope. Bull!!!
“I realize that the studios, for the most part, are not concerned with realism. Okay. But why can’t those who strive for realism be certain that their actors correctly pronounce scientific words used in scripts (re: ‘Marcus Welby’s’ pronunciation of titer as titer rather than titer). Agreed, these are small points and they affect only a minority of the movie and television audience but they greatly detract from whatever enjoyment one might derive from watching such pseudo-scientific representations. Why don’t television and movie studios contact technical advisors before filming such crap?”
While Mr. Farrell’s gripes are well founded, in the main they are irrelevant. I’ll try to explain why…that is, if you’re still bearing in mind verisimilitude and what I said about such errors not being pivotally important.
But before I do, he said, throwing in another digression, let me recount a personal experience about how actors fuck up a writer’s words, that harks back to Mr. Farrell’s complaint about Percy Rodriguez.
I was fairly fresh in town. I got an assignment on the old Ripcord series, just before it and Ziv Studios went to that Great Trendex Rating in the Sky. I wrote a script about a great writer, Hemingwayesque by intent, who was dying of cancer and was planning to commit suicide by taking a ’chute drop and not pulling the cord. At one point in the script the writer, Aaron Sparks, is interviewed by a newsman who says to him, “Tell me, Mr. Sparks, how does it feel to be the last of the giants? They’re all dead and gone now…Hemingway, Faulkner, Thurber, Camus…you’re the last. How does it feel?”
I was whey-faced and innocent. I didn’t know what filmed tv was like. The segment was shot and I managed to get invited to see the “dailies” only by chance. But there I sat in a darkened viewing room at Ziv as they ran that scene. To begin with, they’d changed my newsman to a woman (on the theory, I suppose, that there was no sex in the script), and I sat there as she stumbled through her lines like Joe Namath after the KC Chiefs did an adagio on his face. She gibbered through my lines till she got to the part where she said, “They’re all dead and gone now…Hemingway, Faulkner, Thurber, Cay-muss…” and I came straight up out of that screening-room seat like a man with a Roman candle up his ass.
“No! No no no no, you jerks. It’s Kah-mew not Cay-muss! You’ve got to change that!”
The executive producer, a gentleman named “Babe” Unger, turned around in his seat and demanded to know who the lunatic in the back of the room was, and why he was there, and why he was shouting. The producer, a very good guy named Jon Epstein, sank down in his chair and said it was the writer. “Not the writer,” I bellowed, “I’m T*H*E W*R*I*T*E*R!” (In those days, before lumps, I was surfeited with the belief that the creator of the story was more than a piece of shit to be flushed away after the words fade-out were written. I’ve since learned better, but I still bellow for the cap letters and the little gold stars.)
“Toss him out,” Unger mumbled.
Jon Epstein promised they would loop out the offensive word because God knows it might cost them a couple of big nickels to have the actress come in to dub that line, but either he forgot or he couldn’t, because every time they rerun that idiot show, some friend calls me from N’walens or N’Yawk and laughs at my stupidity…don’t you know how to pronounce Camus’s name, Ellison, you morphodite?
So don’t talk to me about boob actors, Mr. Farrell. I’ve suffered far greater indignities at their mouths than you.
But again, it plays right back to verisimilitude and the validity of being minuscule-point accurate. What does it matter to the great mass of viewers whether titer or Camus is pronounced correctly, as long as the show makes its point and hits them where they live?
For you or me, a great deal of difference. For them, none whatsoever.
Which is why most directors and actors (on whom falls responsibility for accuracy of dialogue and pronunciation) are little better than illiterates on any subject’s minutiæ save that of directing or acting. They can rap for endless boring centuries about motivation and sense of space and relationship and all that other semi-psychiatric bullshit, but they haven’t the faintest idea how to pronounce Goethe or of the difference between an ekg and an eeg. Since no one really gives a shit, no one insists they go to school and learn what it’s all about. Again, I said most directors and actors, not all. Bob Culp and Leonard Nimoy and Lee Pogostin and Jim Poe are typical of the exceptions: brilliant, educated, literate.
And thus, through C.V., Farrell, digressions, and other sidetrackers, we come to the central thesis of this piece (which, because I’ve gone on at such length, will probably have to be condensed).
It doesn’t matter what the truth is, as long as it looks real.
That may seem heresy coming from a dude who keeps bleating constantly about truth this and truth that, but both C.V. and Farrell pick nits from privileged viewpoints. To a physiologist, the giantism of Land of the Giants is laughable. It ignores the inverse cube law. It can’t be. It never could be. But kids all over this country dig the show, and after a while you are willing to suspend disbelief to groove with the story. That is, you would be willing to do so were not the plots so fucking stupid and boring.
What I’m saying is that in many areas of human knowledge as they apply to tv scripts, it isn’t necessary to the enjoyment of a certain show that every little nut and bolt be screwed down tightly. Mr. Farrell even contradicts himself in one sentence, the second from the end, when he says that (a) these small points affect only a minority of the audience but (b) greatly detract from their enjoyment. Well, you can’t have it both ways, Mr. Farrell. If you’re hip enough to realize that there may be only .006 percent of the total viewing audience who can spot such an error as a “culture under a light microscope,” then that means 99.994 percent of the audience doesn’t know they’ve been messed over and they don’t care. And if they dug the show, and it made its point and it entertained them, then, for all rational purposes, it doesn’t matter.
It’s a matter of education, on the big end of the funnel. At one end we have the actors, directors, writers—the creative folk. On the other end we have the Silent Majority. If you get all the creators educated, it still doesn’t mean anything because the Mass doesn’t know.
Where it matters, and this is the ultimate answer, I think, is in expanding the parameters of general knowledge of the Mass. For the last thirty years no one but a righteous hermit would have written a Western with the posse riding giraffes, because everybody knows they used horses in the American West of the 1800s. The courtroom farces of the twenties and thirties can’t play today because we’ve had eighteen years of Perry Mason and The Defenders and The Law and Mr. Jones, et al. People now know the feel of a court of law (which is why the Chicago Conspiracy guerrilla theater trial is such a shocker). Similarly, even hack writers no longer write sf screenplays in which meteors whistle as they zoom past a spaceship. Everyone knows there is no sound in a vacuum, and they know space is a near vacuum, so there ain’t no way a meteor can whistle. Their knowledge, because of exposure to more facts, has grown.
It seems to me that up to a certain point (and that point is gross, glaring inaccuracy that invalidates an entire story) the only thing that counts is verisimilitude. It should seem right. It should feel right. It should at least give the appearance of truth and accuracy, because the essential point is that tv is not reality.
Who really believes there are witches like Samantha? Who really believes people can be as idiotic as those on The Beverly Hillbillies or The Brady Bunch? By the very act of watching such shows, we accept the illogic, impossibility, and irrationality of what they’re doing. We accept the hype in exchange for some few moments of cheap pleasure.
I quite agree that on serious dramatic shows absolute accuracy should be the goal, but I hardly think we can take too much affront at scientific bungling on U.N.C.L.E. or The Satan Bug. They are fantasies, friends. They can no more be accurate than relevant.
If you want truth and reality and decimal points in the right places, watch The 21st Century or First Tuesday. Don’t look for truth on The High Chaparral or Face the Nation.