Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God (24 page)

Ethel Noaker Silliphant Wellershaus died in 1996, a few months after her older son, who had been supporting her in a Sun City rest home. Tiana was one of the last family members to visit.

There had been no memorial service at the Writers Guild. Such a commemoration would have been
de rigeur
for as prolific and successful a writer as Silliphant. But he had not just burned bridges when he left Hollywood, he’d blown them to smithereens, and much of his good will along with it. Referring to the town as an “eel pit” in print or telling the San Francisco Sunday
Examiner
that “Television has reached the bottom of the barrel, yet it constantly finds fresh, new depths,”
[299]
were not endearing deeds. Rather than risk a sparse house, the family and their advisors opted for a private remembrance. Tiana held an intimate service for friends (including the author) in a garden beside the Bergamot Station art gallery in Santa Monica where she was exhibiting photographs from Vietnam. Incense, flowers, candles, his picture, and the recovered Oscar were accompanied by chants and tears.

Stirling Silliphant’s legacy is diverse. Most of his scripts were works-for-hire under a controversial provision imposed by U.S. Copyright law (alone in the world) that deems the employer to be the author of a registered work, not the person who actually creates it. Thus his estate has no control over remakes or assignment of rights by their corporate “author” other than to receive residuals, where applicable. Tiana and her son Stirling have spent considerable time and resources pursuing their rights.

As for the speculative writing into which he poured so much of his soul and his rare free time, most of these properties remain in narrative treatment form awaiting expansion into screenplays — as if anyone but Stirling Silliphant could ever write a Stirling Silliphant script. When he was interviewed by William Froug in 1972 for
The Screenwriter Looks At the Screenwriter,
Silliphant impressed Froug with his efficiency as well as his achievements. “A conversation with Stirling can leave you both stimulated as well as exhausted,” Froug wrote. “His mind races ahead seizing new ideas and articulating them with the ease of a trapeze artist who knows precisely when to leap.” Speaking with Silliphant at the Pingree headquarters at Paramount Pictures — one of six offices he kept all over town including one on the Sunset Strip — he noted that the writer drove around in a white Rolls-Royce, had a personal income of $500,000 a year, and “is neither Glick nor Gandhi” but is “a brilliant, determined, ambitious man moving at all deliberate speed toward his own private destination.”
[300]

Froug reported that Silliphant went through the 100-page transcript of their interview the afternoon he received it, made notes and changes on every page, and gave it to his secretary to retype while phoning Froug to discuss the changes, then had it back in Froug’s hands that very evening.

In other words, a writer writes, but a good writer
rewrites.
This begins to explain his literary legacy.

“I suppose at the beginning of my screenwriting,” Silliphant recalled of his evolution as a writer, “I still had one foot in the old bear-trap — still unable to escape from the constant reminders all writers get all the way back to Greek theater — about act one, act two and act three. It was not until I wrote more and learned from my mistakes, and until I lived more and learned from life itself that every moment is a lifetime, and that matters seldom have a remembered beginning or a conscious end. When life ends, we are, fortunately, not aware of the exact split-second of our passing. So that we are constantly having to deal with the existing moment in time, and this present-time moment has always fascinated me at the expense of past and future. So, when I write, I let the characters drive the story. If there are expositional or connective elements to be dealt with, I keep trying to push them back, deeper and deeper into the film, right to the very end — and, at that point, to avoid the Agatha Christie summary/round-up scene where all the suspects are called into the parlor and we learn the butler did
not
do it, I try to end my story
without
the explanation, that is, without the factual explanation, hoping that the emotional truth of what has happened to the a characters will be resolution enough. I must concede that if you’re doing a typical piece of Hollywood shit where nobody can leave the theater until the good guy has blown the bad guy away, you have serious problems with my way of handling a story. My answer — for me, at least — is not to get involved writing the kind of film in which I have to solve a plot problem. Just a simple choice of material!”

He had an even stronger feeling about plot: “I
detest
that word
plot.
I never, never think of plot. I think only and solely of character. Give me the characters, I’ll tell you a story. Maybe a thousand stories. The interaction between and among human beings is the only story worth telling.” He had similar disdain for writers who try to direct the film from the page, that is, add camera angles and movement (even though he had done both) and parentheticals to show what the actors should be feeling. “I fucking detest it,” he fulminated. “I spit in the milk of the brothers of the bastards who do it. It is so inexperienced of such writers. It reveals instantly their lack of knowledge of the hard process of filmmaking. First of all, the director isn’t even going to read such nonsense. And any actor who’s not on his first gig and who has never before held a real-life-by-God-script in his trembling hand is going to black out all those ‘instructions’ in his copy.”

“He was attracted to the kind of simplicity that could happen at any moment when there was conflict and contact between people,” noted his son, Stirling Linh , who is also a writer. “One thing he would coach me on is how to make a scene between two people talking or arguing even better, and that was to bring in an unexpected third element, which could be something as simple as a janitor dropping a mop and one of the participants in the conversation stopping the conversation and walking over and picking up the mop for the janitor. He was detail oriented in that those little things mattered to him. Signature aspects of his writing are its leanness and its simplicity. He felt the same way about filmmaking. He was always saying that if the camera isn’t from someone’s perspective then it shouldn’t be there. And the John Locke novels were sort of the Bourne before Bourne, that sort of thinking man’s mercenary.”
[301]

Though he lived well into the computer age, Silliphant refused to use one. “I tried, really gave it my best shot, but it never connected for me,” he insisted. “I felt too much separation between me and the [computer] screen; somehow the words up there lacked immediacy. I could not relate to them.” His weapon of choice was not exactly a steam-powered Royal manual model, though. “I find that I am faster on the IBM Wheelwriter than any computer instructor I’ve ever known is on the computer. Believe it or not, I’ve held contests with the doubters and every time creamed them. Also, the painful process of retyping, as opposed to the instantaneous capability of the computer to change and revise, makes me deal with what I’ve written in a constantly intimate sense, so that, by the time I’m through with a script, every page has been revised, polished and rewritten a dozen or more times. If I were to make this process computer-easy, I would divorce myself from the hard work of facing up to every word as though for the first time.”

His writing method was similarly precise: “I type on plain white paper with three holes punched into the left side of the sheet so I can place the finished pages into a loose-leaf notebook and move them around if I decide to change my continuity or if I want to replace the scenes already written. Also, I never write a script in continuity. I always write my favorite scene first. I always ask myself, ‘What is the single most important, most moving, most dramatic scene in the film, the single scene people will still be talking about a week later?’ I write that scene first, no matter where it might play in the finished script. And I put it into the notebook. Then I write my next-most-favorite scene and put it into what may end up being its appropriate position. And so on and so on until I have to start connecting those fragments. The last thing I write are these connections and I spend hours thinking of them in terms of images and locations.”

“Stirling was a brilliant writer who could turn a blank page into fantastic material by just dropping that paper in the typewriter (no computer in those days),” said Charles W. “Chuck” Fries, for whom he and Bert Leonard had developed
Route 66
at CBS.
[302]

“Once he started his work day, he never left the office,” his son recalled. “We barely saw him unless he had to go pee or make coffee. I don’t know if he took lunches, which is funny, because he was such a big food person. I’d do my homework in his office, on the carpet. He was totally in another world and didn’t even notice my presence. I was also not making any noise.” In addition to wearing the green eyeshade, he would act out the scenes at his desk, gyrating, bouncing, and rocking back and forth at the keyboard, sometimes speaking his dialogue aloud, and other times reacting to it. He would play music on headphones. There were sometimes complaints from neighbors who could hear him typing into the night. Only a writer who has been “in the zone” can appreciate what it’s like when a character takes hold. Where Silliphant was using many of his characters as surrogates, his identification with them could be doubly profound.

His concentration was legendary. “One day I went to his office to see him,” David Morrell said. “He’d just had his wisdom teeth out that morning and, by god, that afternoon he was writing. He’s sitting there at his typewriter with his cheeks all puffed out with cotton like a chipmunk, and he’s writing.”

Just as William Goldman had no idea what a script looked like the first time he was hired to write one, Silliphant refused to be confined by formats that made it easier for studio budget wonks to do their jobs but harder for writers to do theirs. “I have no self-imposed criteria for ‘how a script should look.’ Or all the rest of the incantations which the guys who write the ‘How To’ books recommend. All that stuff tends to be trendy and to drop by the wayside as time drums relentlessly by. Every script is different. Laying these ‘rules’ in is like coaching a guy on foreplay. Scripts cannot be ground out by guidelines. To me, a script should be seamless: one complete piece, with nothing that can be added and nothing that can be taken away. You can only arrive at that totality from within a script, not by waxing and buffing.”

What is seldom, if ever, brought up is Silliphant’s chameleonic ability to write for an astonishing number of ongoing television series, sometimes only one or two episodes, and yet pick up on the characters, their speaking rhythms, and their interpersonal dynamics. Today it is common for a freelancer to slave over a script, endure network and producer notes, turn in a final draft, and then have the executive producer or show runner do a final pass, sometimes for credit. Silliphant’s scripts were seldom molested.

Moreover, his impressive — no, incalculable — output of over 200
produced
credits in his forty-five-year career
(Appendix A)
begs the question of whether he has ever been blocked. Surprisingly, the answer is ‘no,’ but that’s because the question was wrong, and the explanation is as good a writing lesson as one is ever going to hear. “Never in the sense most writers think,” he said. “It doesn’t hover out there like some dour incubus. I have never felt it was going to get me. Simply because the act of writing is a professional exercise. You assemble words to express a point of view. I can see no reason, short of being drunk, drugged, or physically incapacitated in some other way, why a professional cannot just do the work at hand. The only writer’s block I have ever experienced is the sense that what I may be writing is below my hopes for what I may be trying to write at any given time. Sometimes you simply can’t get it right. It eludes you. I have learned in these cases to let it go. Don’t chase bad writing. Replace it with good writing — and start all over again.

“The writing is the easiest part of it,”
[303]
he said, then corrected, “the trying period is the period of conceptualization, followed by research. This pre-writing time can take anywhere from six months to ten years. But once I know everything there is to know about my story’s milieu, once I have taken the separate pills of their characters, then the actual writing of the script switches to automatic pilot. It makes no difference whether the script is for TV or a feature, the writing period is the same: five pages a day, seven days a week. That’s it. Nothing mystical. You just sit there and keep typing. When you’ve got your five pages, you’re the hell out of there and off to explore life away from the IBM. So, okay, that’s 35 pages a week. If you’re talking about a one-hour TV show, you should finish in two weeks. Less, since these scripts should run between 50 and 60 pages, depending on their content. A two-hour MOW takes me three weeks since these end up anywhere from 105 to 110 pages in length. A script for a feature, using this measurement, should take no more than four weeks, at the max. But here, in consideration of the fact that you can elevate the quality of dialogue and the visualization of the scenes themselves, their staging, their mood, their texture, given the fact that a director is going to have more money and can spend more time in shooting a feature than a TV chunk of sausage, I cut down my page count per day to three pages rather than maintain the five-page-a-day pace. I round this out at 20 pages a week and allow myself between six and eight weeks for the first draft. If a writer takes more time than that he is bullshitting you. Of course, if you want to calculate working time from sitting down without the faintest idea of what you intend to write — until you finish whatever that thing may be — you could spend a lifetime and produce nothing.”

“What is this mystique when people say, ‘I spent all year working on a script?,’” he added to interviewer Bill Collins. “I say they spent all year at the beach, goofing off, avoiding the responsibility of trying to solve their scene. They didn’t sit down, as a producer or director must, and work at the film. My ‘inspiration’ comes by sitting there. If I don’t write anything that day, the next day I have to write ten pages. Another thing I find, if I’m really blocked, when I go to bed at night, I will feed it into my head before I go to bed and do a thirty-minute self-hypnosis in the dark, and it has never yet failed me. I don’t do it too often; I’m afraid of using it up. You wake up the next morning and wonder what the problem was. You don’t die when you sleep, so why not let your brain work?”
[304]

“I feel that the screenwriter must isolate himself from the established ignorance of the people he’s writing for — the producer, the director, the actors (with some exceptions), the studio executives — and write for himself, that he must invest his script with a visionary energy which not only describes a particular scene but communicates his own unique and utterly subjective apprehension of what the scene feels like to him at that moment. I don’t believe one can do that by simply having your coffee, rubbing your eyes and sitting down at some machine and writing your scene off the top of your head. Hence, my belief in an almost mythic or spiritual hype before starting work each day.