SIRS:
As one who has felt the hand of television upon his own work, I would like to endorse Frank R. Pierson's lucid analysis of television censorship.1
Last fall CBS bought my short novel The Long March for production on Playhouse 90. Somewhat like the draftee protagonist of Robert Dozier's A Real Fine Cutting Edge*—a “daring” work, perhaps, but one which, as Mr. Pierson ruefully points out, was finally broadcast only because the network censor mistakenly believed that it had the approval of the Army—my story's hero is also a rebellious soul, a young Marine reserve officer whose mutinous rage against authority in general, and his commanding officer in particular, leads to his own downfall. Unlike the hero of Cutting Edge, however, my captain loses. He resists the System and it is his ruin. You cannot buck the System—I think that is what I was trying to say, for if you do you will pull disaster down upon your head….At the end of my story the captain (who is not without his foolish, impulsive moments), having faced down his commanding officer at the conclusion of a senseless and brutal hike ordered by the same CO, stands ready to receive a court-martial. The tragedy is implicit here. At the same time, however, the commanding officer is treated with sympathy and, all things considered, the Marine Corps gets off probably with more grace than it deserves. You might think that even Procter & Gamble and the manufacturers of Prestone (this was October, remember, and anti-freeze was getting the hard sell), would have been satisfied with some honest and straightforward treatment of this story, which attempts to demonstrate the truth known perhaps, far down, even to Union Carbide vice presidents: that military life corrupts and we would be a lot better off without it.
But how naïve. I shall leave out the esthetic side of the televised version—the script, the acting, the direction—which was catastrophically bad even for television (my grocer, who ordinarily admits to watching everything, turned the program off mid-way and asked me indignantly the next day if I was planning to sue). Just as importantly, or even more so, the show simply suggested that Mr. Pierson knows what he is talking about when he maintains that television is “in fact officially censored and colored to show authority in a favorable light.” Because the script was submitted to the Marine Corps. Naturally, it had to be, not only because, as Mr. Pierson points out, all scripts that touch on government matters are submitted to authority but also because the story calls for masses of marching men, which the brass—after approving the script with what I suppose amounted to some glee—handily provided. One can imagine what was left of my hero after this collusion of Public Information Office second lieutenants, ad men, and soap peddlers had done with him. My bedeviled, desperate captain had become a self-pitying zero who, far from eliciting the viewer's sympathies, really deserved all the punishment that the Marine Corps could heap upon him. Further, rather than end the show upon the same note that my story ended (a very simple note of defeat, really, with the captain in ruin and promised a court-martial), the powers that arranged the TV version saw fit to stage an actual military trial in which it was safely pointed out that the Marine Corps is still pretty much tops any way you look at it.
I understand that in making these comments I am in that position known to anyone who has trafficked with TV or Hollywood, which is somewhat like that of a woman who cries rape when in fact she acquiesced freely and received good money for the undertaking. In reality, however, my heart was not greatly troubled by this travesty of my work; a book remains a book. Also several thousand dollars remain several thousand dollars. But one or two disturbing questions haunted my mind, and Mr. Pierson's article sheds considerable light upon the mystery of why it is that any attempt to grapple on TV with problems dealing with the military is doomed to failure from the start.
My most bothersome question, of course, was the ancient one: why did they do it at all? The Long March is not (unfortunately) a celebrated work, bound to attract millions of viewers by its very name. Divorced of its philosophical content, the narrative becomes utterly routine, so routine indeed that it is difficult to see why, instead of “adapting” my story, the producer did not just hire some accomplished hack to compose a nice slick original script glorifying the Marine Corps. The producer himself is an intelligent, decent, well-intentioned man, with many worthwhile things in television to his credit; honestly caring for my story as much as he did, it is difficult to believe that it was any such simple matter as a final lapse of taste on his part which caused the disaster. (Actually I must confess that I was so dazzled by his sincerity and good intentions that, reading the script just prior to the broadcast—cold with horror, yet still somehow unable to believe that what I beheld on the printed page could be transmitted in all of its sordidness to the tiny screen—I wired the producer a demented, “Well done.”)
But then who or what was the real culprit? The sponsors? The network watchdogs? Military censors? A combination of these? I do not know. Nor do I know whether the downright badness of the script with its military yea-saying made approval by authority a foregone conclusion; nor whether a perfectly adequate script became perverted as it went through the labyrinths of sponsor approval and then through the Pentagon mill: either way, what happened to the story in its transformation from an artistic insight to a shoddy lie makes me realize that Mr. Pierson's concern with TV censorship is rather more than academic and that in the instance of The Long March something more dangerous was in operation than a mere failure of talent. Someone somewhere along the line messed it up because someone was afraid….In the end the real culprit in television is not just sponsor approval or official censorship but an ignorant fear of the truth which permeates all other aspects of our society too, and which poisons art at its roots. It is almost as ignoble a censorship as censorship itself.
[New Republic, April 6, 1959.]
* Dozier's drama was presented on The Kaiser Aluminum Hour, January 15, 1957. The cast included George Peppard, Jack Warden, and Dick York.—J.W.