Slippage (33 page)

But early in November of 1984, I received a call from Jim Crocker, who identified himself as Supervising Producer of
The Twilight Zone,
then being readied for a September 1985 revival on CBS. He said TZ wanted to purchase rights to my story "Shatterday" for teleplay adaptation by then-freelancer Alan Brennert (soon to be Executive Story Consultant Brennert). I told him to forget it. He asked me why. I told him that it had nothing to do with Alan who was/is a friend of mine—and, in fact, is the only writer working in television to whom I had ever voluntarily given permission to adapt one of my stories. I said I thought Alan would likely do a spiffy job with "Shatterday." But I said no; I wanted nothing to do with tv, and had seen enough of my work crippled to last me a lifetime.

That led us into a conversation during the course of which I unloaded all my long-gathered thoughts about why fantasy so seldom worked when transferred to the video screen. It was a long chat, and when I was finished lecturing, Jim said he and the Executive Producer, Philip DeGuere, had put together a "bible" of guidelines for writers intending to work on the series, complete with story-outlines. He asked me if I'd mind taking a look at it, to give him and DeGuere my feelings about whether they were on the right track or not.

I said yes. Mostly because Jim Crocker is one of the most decent, charming men I have ever met. Honest and talented and compassionate to a fault, Crocker's patience in listening to my babble, and his genuine sense of concern that TZ be done properly, had won me completely. So I said yes, I'd look at the "bible."

A messenger delivered it later that day from the studio where TZ had its offices, the CBS Studio Center lot very near my home. It is now called the MTM Studios, but to me it will always be Four Star, because it was there in the early Sixties that I had my first successes in television, writing
Burke's Law.
But I digress.

I read the "bible" and a day or so later called Crocker to give him my comments about the proposed stories to be filmed. I was not entirely laudatory. In fact, when Jim tells this part of the story the words
brutal, barbaric
and
offensive
are prominently featured.

Nonetheless, he suggested it would be a salutary thing for him and DeGuere to meet me, to discuss further the opinions I'd ventured...and to try a little harder to get me to cough up the rights to "Shatterday." I said, sure, why not; but it was unlikely that I'd change my mind.

On November 6th, DeGuere and Crocker came to my home and we sat in the Art Deco Dining Pavilion for three hours, with Crocker silently smiling at the first confrontation between me and the legendary DeGuere. I have heard Jim equate the meeting with that held by Pope Leo I and Attila the Hun at the gates of Rome in the year 452. I liked DeGuere at once.

By the time they left, I had not only agreed to let Alan do "Shatterday," but I had agreed to write an original story for the show.

Well, one thing led to another.

Like you, I forgot the lessons of the past. I was so charmed by Crocker and DeGuere, so filled with hubris that
I
, alone of all the wretches crawling across this planet, had the special wisdom to bring superlative fantasy to the small screen, that I allowed myself to be seduced. No other word works as well. I was seduced. By respect, and friendship, by the challenge, and by that smooth, convincing liar, memory.

On December 3rd, 1984, after ten years away from the medium, I accepted a position as Creative Consultant to
The Twilight Zone,
working for CBS, at a staggering weekly salary that within a few months totally eradicated the $45,000 debt under which I had been bending for several years. Bread, I had discovered, no longer cost 13¢ a loaf; and 37¢ no longer bought a tank of gas; and one forgets how nice it is not having to consider selling one's record collection to make the mortgage payment.

On November 26th, 1985—a Tuesday—one year after going onboard TZ, I resigned from the series. But for that year of employment (the longest job I've ever held in my entire life) I did not work in television; rather, I was permitted to caper and whistle through Camelot.

Working with DeGuere and Crocker, Alan Brennert and Story Editor Rockne O'Bannon, Producer Harvey Frand and Barbara Sigg and Janien Rotundo and Patrice Messina and Ken Swor and Paul Deason and all the rest of the loonies who were drawn into that dream of excellence we all held for what TZ could be...was one of the happiest times of my life.

It was by no means all lightness and joy and freedom to create. There were days and nights of genuine horror, of pain suffered by one or another of our little cadre that was a nasty palliative to our cockeyed camaraderie and the sweetly exhausting months of 'round-the-clock work. But we learned each other's weaknesses and annoying habits; and we opted either to live with them, or to put each other against the wall and shout back,
Stop doing that or I will nail your forehead to a coffee table!
We grinned at each other constantly, knowing that not only were we privileged to be at just the right spot to make history, but
knowing
that we knew it; that we could enjoy it as it was happening, rather than looking back ten years to say, "That was a terrific, special time!"

And if the first season's shows were not all of the caliber of
Nightcrawlers
and
Wordplay,
of
Her Pilgrim Soul
and
Profile in Silver,
of
One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty
and
Cold Reading,
at least—given the network interference, that damnable eight o'clock time-slot on Friday nights, and a million budget and production problems that no viewer can ever know— we went at the job with bared fangs and high skill and true love. I have no regrets about working that year in the bowels of the beast television. And would have happily gone on to a second season, ratings be damned.

So why, the impatient reader asks after all this history and bonhomie, did the hardcore-unemployable Ellison walk off the best job he'd ever had?

In a word:
Nackles.

Under the pseudonym "Curt Clark," the brilliant novelist Donald Westlake wrote, and saw published in the January 1964 issue of
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction,
a nasty little Christmas horror story titled "Nackles." It was reprinted only once, in the 1967 Ace paperback anthology NEW WORLDS OF FANTASY, edited by Terry Carr.

In the Fall of 1984, before I came on the show, Hugo and Nebula winner George R.R. Martin brought the story to the attention of DeGuere. George's excellent novel THE ARMAGEDDON RAG had been optioned as a feature film by DeGuere several years earlier, and they had become friends. It was natural that when Phil signed to do TZ, that he would solicit work from George; and George sent him Xerox copies of the story; and Phil optioned it for George to turn into a teleplay for the show. I don't think either of them knew that "Curt Clark" was a heavyweight like Westlake, as Don had used the pseudonym infrequently. (Few alive today remember ANARCHAOS, a 40¢ Ace original novel, 1967, though it is a swell little thriller.)

By the time I came to TZ, George had noodled the idea that formed the core of "Nackles" to a point where he could write it up as a story outline. I had had success adapting Stephen King's "Gramma"—a difficult but enjoyable assignment—and was busily writing both the short story and the teleplay of "Paladin of the Lost Hour" when George's treatment came in.

Those of you who have read "Nackles" in its print medium incarnation (included,
seriatum,
in this volume), will perceive that what works on the page would not work on the screen. The core idea, the anti-Santa, was so strong, that it obliterated the rest of the story for visual adaptation. George, who at that time had had very little experience with the script idiom, though he has gone on to do some excellent teleplays and subsequently was hired as a Story Editor on TZ, stubbed his toe on the piece, and no one (George included) was particularly happy with the result.

At the same time, we were trying to breathe life into an idea submitted by a writer named Bryce Maritano; a story about an Elvis imitator who goes back in time to meet The King. The story meetings we held, in which we sat for hours trying to make either silk purses out of sow's ears or sow's ears out of silk purses, invariably foundered on Maritano's story, "The Once and Future King." It was a touching, dangerous concept, but Maritano didn't seem to know where to go with it. There was talk of putting the story in abeyance, but with one of those rare insights my wife refers to as "dumb luck," I said to DeGuere, "Jeezus, what dummies we are! One of the basic problems of this script is that Maritano doesn't have the feel for rock'n'roll. He's even got Elvis playing an electric guitar, and everybody
knows
Presley played only acousticals. Give the story to George. He's perfect for it. He's got the smarts for this one if anybody has!"

So George was relieved of "Nackles" and went on to write a killer segment based on the Maritano idea, the premiere show of the second season.

But we still needed someone to write "Nackles" for the special Christmas show. Since it was
my
big mouth that had freed the job for a new writer, and since it was
my
big mouth that ventured ways in which Westlake's gruesome little
bon mot
could be altered to work visually, it was
into
my big mouth that Crocker, O'Bannon, DeGuere and Brennert wadded the script.

It was summer before I got to it. I began by doing research. Richard Finkelstein, Director, Bureau of Client Fraud Investigation, New York City Human Resources Administration, spent several hours on the long distance phone with me, explaining how the welfare setup works these days in Manhattan. Then I went back to all the stories I'd written about tenement life in New York, and refreshed the recollections, the smells and sounds.

Understand: I am no part of the shared delusion that if one merely entertains with television, that it is a job worthy unto itself. Entertain, yes! That goes without saying. But a good writer does that automatically, it's built into the machine. Telling a thumpingly good, mesmerizing story is what one does without question. But beyond that, any writer worth his/her hire knows that
all
writing, one way or another, is subversive. It is guerrilla warfare against the
status quo.
It is not whimsical that the Falwells and Tipper Gores and Wildmons of the world seek to silence music and to burn books: they correctly perceive them to be dangerous. Kafka tells us, "I believe that we should read only those books that wound and stab us. If a book we are reading does not rouse us with a blow to the head, then why read it? A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us." So should it be with television, a medium so powerful that it can change our cultural values in a generation. But it isn't so. And television is
merely
entertainment. At best. For the most part it is as memorable and meaningful as what Aquinas called "a fart in the wind." Writing, done well, after the entertainment part has been taken care of, should be journalism.

And I am one with Joseph Pulitzer, who is reputed to have said, "The purpose of journalists should be to afflict the comfortable."

So for Christmas, I turned "Nackles" into a statement on bigotry and racism. You read it; I'll abide by your judgment; and see if it is a strong statement. It was certainly
intended
to be strong. To sit between a remake of that gentle Yuletide fable
The Night of the Meek
and Alan Brennert's adaptation of Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" in a tripartite holiday package that would make a viewing experience no one would soon forget. Ah, vanity, thy name is scenarist.

My first draft teleplay was handed in on July 15th, 1985 and by September 25th, when I had completed a rewrite, we knew we had something in the oven that might be difficult to get past the network, but if it could be done...gangbusters!

I sent the script to Don Westlake, to get his feeling about it, and on October 25th he wrote me (in part): "Okay. In fact,
okay!
It's different, God knows, but it would have to be, wouldn't it? When this idea first came along, I said to myself, well, if they want to, but I don't think it's possible. I looked at the story again at that time, and it seemed to me it wasn't a story at all, it was just an essay with incidents. I wouldn't have had the slightest idea how to turn it into a real-life narrative, and I'm amazed that you not only believed there was a way, but found it."

I felt like a million bucks.

A final draft was handed in on November 3rd, followed by a "revised final" on the 13th of that month. Christmas was coming at us steadily, and we had to get moving or we'd never get the segment into that triple-play package. Another revised draft: November 14th. A third revised final: November 20th.

For some time on the show, DeGuere and Crocker and our line producer Harvey Frand, and Alan and Rock had been trying to convince me that I should try my hand at directing. I'd resisted, because I'm a writer, and that's what I like to do. But in the course of the season I'd seen so many lame directors mess up so many sweet scripts, that by the middle of November I was convinced a talented mollusk could direct decently. So on the 21st I told Harvey and Jim I wanted to direct "Nackles."

It was a short script, perhaps only eleven minutes long as it would finally be aired, and it had gone through all the personnel at CBS programming, as well as the L.A.-based CBS Standards & Practices people. They'd seen it as a dangerous script, but we'd bartered a word here, an epithet there, and it had been approved for us to go forward into production.