INSTALLMENT 27 |

Interim Memo

The conclusion of the story about Al Wilson takes care of itself; but a month elapsed between the original publication of parts one and two. And I make reference to intervening events. Here’s what happened to those sidebars:

 

1. The Starlost went on the air, over the NBC owned-&-operated stations. 20th Century-Fox screwed me, screwed the production, didn’t have it filmed by Sir Lew Grade in England, but rather laid it off on a Canadian company. It was a terrible series, and I talk about what happened in an essay titled “Somehow, I Don’t Think We’re in Kansas, Toto” that originally appeared as the introduction to PHOENIX WITHOUT ASHES, a novel based on my Writers Guild Award-winning pilot teleplay. The novel was published as a paperback original by Gold Medal in 1975, and was excellently written by Edward Bryant. It is now out of print (but may return soon). The essay, updated and expanded, can be found in two places: STALKING THE NIGHTMARE (1982) and the thirty-five-year retrospective THE ESSENTIAL ELLISON (1987). So I won’t take up space reprinting it again here. If you’re curious, you can find it. A nightmare.

2. The novel based on The Dark Forces didn’t get finished. Pinnacle didn’t publish it. The tv series went through script development—another year out of my writing life—and the network gave it a pass. “We don’t think the audience wants to see sf or fantasy,” they said. That was 1973–74. They knew, with the intelligence best capsulated by critic John Simon in the phrase “…as vast and mysterious as the inside of a noodle…” that the American audience was turned off by sf and fantasy. And they were proved as absolutely correct as they always are, by the utter disinterest of the American audience in Star Wars, three years later; as they have been by such films as Alien, Close Encounters, E.T., Brazil, Roger Rabbit, the Star Trek films, Batman and maybe a hundred others since 1973–74; such unarguably immutable disinterest that brought back The Twilight Zone and has become even more concretized, to the extent that sf and fantasy films now hold almost all the box office records. How could I have ever doubted their keen insights and informed extrapolations?

3. My mother died. I write about that later.

4. Not only were the charges of strike-breaking against me dismissed, but in the extensive hearing set up according to Writers Guild rules (chaired by the famous Christopher Knopf), an unprecedented censure of the Board of Directors was handed down. Much of the background of this incident—mentioned so casually in my column, as it was just unfolding at that time—is related in the essay about The Starlost. Suffice to say, in this life, the two most despicable things you could call me—that I would sooner put a bullet through my head than be—are scab or plagiarist. I had not, in any way, hindered our strike. I had, in fact, resisted all blandishments and threats on the part of the studio, had even gone so far as to thwart their machinations to get another writer to do the work I refused to do; and had gone to Canada at the direct instructions of the Board of Directors (hence the investigatory committee’s censure), and with grave misgivings.

5. And “Catman” can be found in my collection APPROACHING OBLIVION. And so much for updating. My, how time flies.