Phoenix Without Ashes Read online

  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.

  But as I sat there in Los Angeles writing my script, I received a call from Mr. Klenman, who was at that moment in Vancouver. “Mr. Ellison,” he said, politely enough, “this is Norman Klenman. Bill Davidson wanted me to call you about The Starlost. I’ve read your bible and, frankly, I find it very difficult and confusing—I don’t understand science fiction—but if you want to train me, and pay me the top-of-the-show money the Guild just struck for, I’ll be glad to take a crack at a script for you.” I thanked him and said I’d get back to him when I’d saved my protagonist from peril at the end of act four.

  When I walked off the show, guess who they hired not only as story editor, to replace me, but to rewrite my script, as well. If you guessed Golda Meir, you lose. It was Norman Klenman who “don’t understand science fiction.”

  My walkout on my brain child, and all that pretty fame and prettier money was well in the wind by the time of Klenman’s call, but I was still intending to write the scripts I’d contracted for, when the following incidents happened, and I knew it was all destined for the ashcan.

  I was in Dallas. Guest of honor at a convention where I was trying to summon up the gall to say The Starlost would be a dynamite series. I was paged in the lobby. Phone call from Toronto. It was Bill Davidson. The conversation describes, better than ten thousand more words by me, what was wrong with the series:

  “Major problems, Harlan,” Davidson said. Panic lived in his voice.

  “Okay, tell me what’s the matter,” I said.

  “We can’t shoot a fifty-mile-in-diameter biosphere on the ship.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it looks all fuzzy on the horizon.”

  “Look out the window, Bill. Everything is fuzzy on the horizon.”

  “Yeah, but on TV it all gets muddy in the background. We’re going to have to make it a six-mile biosphere.”

  “Whaaaat?!”

  “Six miles is the best we can do.”

  There is a pivotal element in the pilot script where the hero manages to hide out from a lynch mob. In a fifty-mile biosphere that was possible. In a six-mile biosphere all they’d have to do is link arms and walk across it. “But, Bill, that means I’ll have to rewrite the entire script.”

  “Well, that’s the best we can do.”

  Then, in a blinding moment of satori, I realized, Davidson was wrong, dead wrong. His thinking was so limited he was willing to scrap the logic of the script rather than think it through. “Bill,” I said, “who can tell the difference on a TV screen, whether the horizon is six miles away or fifty? And since we’re showing them an enclosed world that’s never existed before, why shouldn’t it look like that! Shoot de facto six miles and call it fifty; it doesn’t make any damned difference!”

  There was a pause, then, “I never thought of that.”

  Only one indication of the unimaginative, hidebound, and obstinately arrogant thinking that emerged from total unfamiliarity with the subject, proceeded through mistake after mistake, and foundered on the rocks of inability to admit confusion.

  The conversation went on with Davidson telling me that even if Trumbull’s effects didn’t work and they couldn’t shoot a fifty-mile biosphere—after he’d just admitted that it didn’t matter what distance they said they were showing—I’d simply love the set they were building of the control room.

  “You’re building the control room?” I said, aghast with confusion and disbelief. “But you won’t need that till the last segment of the series. Why are you building it now?”

  (It should be noted that one of the Maltese Falcons of the series, one of the prime mysteries, is the location of the control room biosphere. When they find it, they can put the ark back on course. If they find it in the first segment, it automatically becomes the shortest TV series in history.)

  “Because you had it in your bible,” he explained.

  “That was intended to show how the series ended, for God’s sake!” I admit I was screaming at that point. “If they find it first time out, we can all pack our bags and show an hour of recorded organ music!”

  “No, no,” Davidson argued, “they still have to find the backup controls, don’t they?”

  “Aaaaarghh,” I aaaarghhed. “Do you have even the faintest scintilla of an idea what a backup control is?”

  “Uh, no. What is it?”

  “It’s a fail-safe system, you drooling imbecile; it’s what they use if the primary fails. The primary is the control... oh, to hell with it!” I hung up.

  When I returned to Los Angeles, I found matters had degenerated even further. They were shooting a six-mile biosphere and calling it six miles. They said no one would notice the discrepancy in the plot. They were building the control room, with that arrogant ignorance that could not be argued with. Ben Bova, who was the technical adviser, had warned them they were going about it in the wrong way. They nodded their heads... and ignored him.

  Then Klenman rewrote me. Oh boy.

  As an indication of the level of mediocrity they were seeking, “Phoenix Without Ashes” had been retitled, in one of the great artistic strokes of all time, “Voyage of Discovery.” I sent them word they would have to take my name off the show as creator and as writer of that segment. But they would have to use my pseudonym, to protect my royalties and residuals. (They had gang-banged my creation, but I’d be damned if I’d let them profit any further from the rape.)

  Davidson reluctantly agreed. He knew the Writers Guild contract guaranteed me that one last weapon. “What’s your pen name? We’ll use it. What is it?”

  “Cordwainer Bird,” I said. “That’s b-i-r-d, as in ‘for the birds.’”

  Now he was screaming. He swore they’d fight me, they’d never use it, I was denying them the use of my name that was so valuable with science fiction fans. Never! Never!

  God bless the Writers Guild.

  If you’d tuned in the show before it vanished from all earthly ken—and ratings guaranteed that hoped-for day was not long in coming—you would have seen a solo credit card that said:

  CREATED BY CORDWAINER BIRD

  and that was your humble servant saying the Visigoths had won again.

  Bova walked off the series the week after Trumbull left. Scientific illiteracies he’d warned them against, such as “radiation virus” (which is an impossibility: radiation is a matter of atoms, viruses are biological entities, even as you and I and Kline and Davidson, I presume), “space senility” (which, I guess, means old, feeble, blathering vacuum), and “solar star” (which is a terrific illiterate redundancy like saying, “I live in a big house home”).

  The Starlost has come up a loser. Once again, because they don’t understand the materials with which they have to work, because they are so tunnel-visioned into thinking every dramatic series can be transliterated from the prosaic and overfamiliar materials of cop, doctor, and cowboy shows, because there was so much money to be skimmed... another attempt at putting sf on the little screen with intelligence has come up a loser.

  Have you learned anything? Probably not. Viewers seem not to care about authenticity, accuracy, logic, literacy, inventiveness. Friends call me when they see The Starlost (which still has some small syndication life in outlying areas), and they tell me how much they like it. I snarl and hang up on them.

  But even though I fell down that rabbit-hole in TV Land and found I was not in Kansas, or any other place that resembled the real world, I had one moment of bright and lovely retribution.

  The roof started to fall in on them, just as I’d said it would if they didn’t come up with decent scripts and a production head who knew what he was doing, and they called Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, and they offered him fifty percent of the show if he’d come up and produce the show out of trouble for them. Gene laughed at them and said what did he need fifty percent of a loser for, he had one hundred percent of two winners of his own. They said they could under
stand that, but did he have someone else in mind whom he could recommend as producer? Gene said, sure he did.

  They made the mistake of asking him who.

  He said, “Harlan Ellison. If you hadn’t screwed him so badly, he could have done a good job for you.”

  Then he hung up on them.

  Which is just what viewers did.

  As I’d warned them, NBC received such lousy reviews of the show, they did not pick up the option for an additional eight segments. There were only sixteen episodes of The Starlost. I could not watch them. With the exception of watching the abomination created from my script. “Phoenix Without Ashes,” I never saw one of the shows.

  Perhaps you were equally as fortunate.

  And the only good thing that has come from my association with The Starlost is now in your hands. This book, what I take to be a masterful adaptation of my original pilot script for the series, is considerably more than the typical “script-into-potboiler novel.” It is solely and wholly the work of an exciting young sf writer named Ed Bryant. If you aren’t familiar with his special talent, this is a good introduction, and should compel you to look up his two books of short stories. Ed took the script and expanded it in every possible way. It is deeper, richer, more exciting than any ten segments of any TV show.

  Had I been permitted to creatively steer the show in intelligent and entertaining directions, I would have asked Ed to write some scripts for me. Had I written a book based on my script myself, I would have wanted it to be as good as this one. But in a happy, crazy turn of events, Ed has done the novel himself, and I’m pleased as hell it wasn’t me who wrote it. For Ed brings to it his own vision, his uncommon talent, and a reverence for the primacy of the first writer that is a pleasure to behold.

  What I’m babbling about, is that this is a helluva good book, and Ed has done a smashing job. Please make no confusion in your minds. He based it on my work and my dream, but it is pure Bryant you’ve got here. Which ought to lead you to his other work, and should serve to warn you that Bryant is a major talent in the field of speculative fiction.