Phoenix Without Ashes (2 page)

“Uh, excuse me,” I said, in an act of temerity not usually attributed to writers in Hollywood, “how did you manage to sell this, er,
series
without having a contract with me, or a prospectus, or a pilot script, or a pilot film... or anything?”

“They read your outline, and they bought it on the strength of your name.”

“They
read
it? How?”

He circumnavigated that little transgression of his promise not to set my words on paper, and began talking in grandiose terms about how I’d be the story editor, how I’d have creative control, how I’d write many scripts for the show, and what a good time I’d have in Toronto.

“Toronto?!” I said, gawking. “What the hell happened to London? The Sir Lew Grade Studios. Soho. Buckingham Palace. Swinging London. What happened to all that?”

Mr. Kline, without bothering to inform the creator of this hot property he had been successfully hawking, had been turned down by the BBC and had managed to lay off the project with CTV, as an all-Canadian production of Glen Warren, a Toronto-based operation that was already undertaking to tape
The Starlost
at the CFTO studios in Toronto. It was assumed by Mr. Kline that I would move to Toronto to story edit the series; he never bothered to ask if I
wanted
to move to Canada, he just assumed I would.

Mr Kline was a real bear for assuming things.

Such as: I would write
his
series (which was the way he now referred to it) even though a writers’ strike was imminent. I advised him that if the strike hit, I would be incommunicado, but he waved away my warnings with the words, “Everything will work out.” With such words, Napoleon went to Leipzig.

At that time I was a member of the Board of Directors of the Writers Guild of America, West. I was very pro-union, pro-strike, pro-getting long overdue contract inequities with the producers straightened out.

Just before the strike began, Kline called and said he was taking out advertisements for the series. He said he’d had artwork done for the presentations, and he needed some copy to accompany the drawings. I asked him how he could have artwork done when the spaceship had not yet been designed? (I was planning to create a vessel that would be absolutely feasible and scientifically correct, in conjunction with Ben Bova, editor of
Analog,
the leading sf magazine in the country.) Kline said there wasn’t time for all that fooling-around; ads had to go out
now!

It has always been one of the imponderables of the television industry to me, how the time is always
now,
when three days earlier no one had even
heard
of the idea.

But I gave him some words and, to my horror, saw the ad a week later: it showed a huge bullet-shaped
thing
I guess Kline thought was a spaceship, being smacked by a meteorite, a great hole being torn in the skin of the bullet, revealing many levels of living space within... all of them drawn the wrong direction. I covered my eyes.

Let me pause for a moment to explain why this was a scientifically illiterate, wholly incorrect piece of art, because it was merely the first indication of how little the producers of
The Starlost
understood what they were doing. Herewith, a Child’s Primer of Science Fiction:

There is no air in space. Space is very nearly a vacuum. That means an interstellar vessel, since it won’t be landing anywhere, and doesn’t need to be designed for passage through atmosphere, can be designed any way that follows the function best. The last time anyone used the bullet design for a starship was in
The Green Slime
(a film that oozes across the “Late Late Late Show” at times when normal people are sleeping).

But it indicated the lack of understanding of sf by television executives. Look: if you turn on your set and see a pair of white swinging doors suddenly slammed open by a gurney pushed by two white-smocked attendants, you know that within moments Marcus Welby will be jamming a tube down somebody’s trachea; if you see a dude in a black Stetson lying-out on a butte, aiming a Winchester, you know that within moments the Wells Fargo stage is gonna be thundering down that dusty trail; if Mannix walks into his inner office and there’s a silky lady lounging in the chair across from his desk, you know that by the end of act one someone is going to try ventilating Joe’s hide. It’s all by rote, all programmed, all predictable... which is why sf seems to be having such a resurgence: it
isn’t
predictable. Or at least it shouldn’t be. A science fiction story has to have an interior logic, it has to be consistent, to get the viewer to go along with it. Rigorous standards of plotting
must
be employed to win that willing suspension of disbelief on the part of viewers that will get them to accept the fantastic premise. Break that logic, dumb it up, 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 the executive producer, Doug Trumbull—who had done the special effects for
2001
and had directed
Silent Running—
he had 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, though
TV Guide
takes every opportunity to pass the lie off as utter truth, many television writers are men and women of ethic: they can be rented, but they can’t be bought.

At one point, representatives of Mr. Kline
did
bring in a scab. A nonunion writer to whom they had told a series of outright lies so he’d believe he was saving my bacon. When they approached well-known sf author Robert Silverberg to write the bible, Bob asked them point-blank, “Why isn’t Harlan writing it?” They fum-fuhed 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.

I found out about the end-run, located the writer in a West L.A. 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 seventy-two 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 A.M. till 7 P.M.

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 use. 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,” Kline 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 a sf story 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 dying 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, who 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 disembowelment 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,” 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 didn’t need heavy rewriting. I was too dazed in Toronto to think about Klenman.