All the System and Other Stories, by Emery Asher
Billo & Samuel, 1958
Thanks and Gratitude
At first, thanks must be given to both editor, J. Kemp, and his company, Billo & Samuel, both of which played a part of this project seeing any light. For the opportunity of collecting these four teleplays into the book format, I am a bit shored, and quite flattered. Being offered a book was unexpected, and a signpost or testament to the small bit of limelight a television writer can achieve these days. Never has it been better, and I certainly hope something good is to be found in the reproduction of these scripts into a book. This is my first, true foray into a mode that does not transmit on airwaves, but print is an old friend of mine, and I am pleased to reach you in such a way. My first doubts were as to whether these stories could entertain an audience without actors or visual properties, but I feel they do, and in the end committed to compiling them into a book and penning this short introduction. Billo & Samuel has been good enough to offer, and in being grateful, I feel a need to provide some background on some of the events and story behind these stories of events. I don’t wish to give a manifesto, but I would like to explain a little about the nature of television, and what made the scripts in this book acceptable, or worthy of being compiled in print.
About the Stake of Television
There is no document that can, with adequacy or decree, describe the odd fortes and peculiar advent of a writer in the television game. Various shadows compel various writers, and the medium is far from understood as a whole by those who attempt to navigate its mountains. The early troubles that clotted the workings of scriptwriting for the home screen have not diminished, but are still ever prankishly in effect. This studio industry has workarounds and nice patches, but the inherent weaknesses and a lean toward the demographic approach are basic. These disadvantages are unresolvable, really, and there is no dodging the saturation of airwaves with wrestling and drama (much of it stilted). There is writing that, at times, seems as if its master was wrestling with his own material, and the commercials, of course, are a gaudy interruption when longer than they need to be, which is universally always. The scene of directors and producers, every sort of hand to gain proximity to the process, including a writer, is approaching the time of its adolescence, and as difficult to control as it has been, will worsen for a time still more. The television world is as if a case study in all things acceptably botched. You cannot justify or defend against these traits, but knowledge of how they came about is most certainly available. There is much to learn and still remaining are the winnows of technique and the destruction, or at least, dashing, of the cinema and Broadway mindsets from those conscripts drawn into the game.
As with radio, Hollywood, or the book world (into which I am now joining through a sincere and surprising back door), there is the plausibility that television will release enough of its own carbon dioxide that no animal attached to her habitat might escape before the inevitable suffocation. It may very well fire the pistol backward through its brain. There is still much to attempt and wage in this place, however, and as the cards are dealt, day in and day out, we know these are early days, and a heartening truth is that we are now giving our best, or at the least, giving our attempts at the best and hoping for espousal through our newly enervated critics.
Uncertain Events
The standard unit of measure for a radio or television writer’s failure is one day. This general failure is made up of many smaller incidents that compound easily. They are collected and evaluated to the day, and they accrue their interest in his worth to the day. The writer re-evaluates and moves his failures about in the mind shortly after the Sun sets each evening. It is an incessant task. Failure lets up, however. The trying rejections are punctuated, and almost parenthetically, in successes. Cry foul or cry applesauce; you’re on your way somehow. Acceptance is often as surprising as it is brief; a man does not always seek out those brief accolades he receives, but is awarded them. The days come and go, bringing with them and then taking away each rejection or promised payment. The days do little for the soul, however. The true metric of a writer, I believe, is in the momentary life. This is a rotation of grand or awful instances that roll round and round, not by days, or years, but by their own fortune. A critic blares your name with vehemence and vitriol from his article, or the sale of sales comes in. The newest scripts face rejections, or the mail brings a choppy burst of checks. The commute from a sale to production might fatigue one nearly to flight, or the Emmy is offered. These occur quickly and in scattered array, and a playwright for television has to enjoy or despise them just as quickly.
There is no more time to revel in a treasured hour than there is to grumble in a loathsome one. It is an hour, and the next is already en route. That the writer must surpass his acceptances in the same manner he gets over his failures is in no way indicative of how those things function: The acceptances get over you fast. The rejections cling and itch you like damp clothes, weigh you down and cause the bourbon to glimmer.
I do remember an incident, early in my career, late 1952, when I had to drive across New York with Arlie Waller, a director who was working on shooting one of my scripts. We were driving from a meeting at the Columbia Broadcasting System headquarters to a bar where many from the production were waiting for us. Many of the crew were having a bit of celebration over the finalization of the remaining set for Isle of the Viceroy. We had a bit of shooting to do still, but were very close to the end-zone. As the two of us drove across town, Arlie and I fell into a busy discussion on a script I had dreamed up but had yet to set into type. He was offering some changes to my story’s premise and advising me about story elements. I was annoyed, trying to champion myself, being somewhat of a baby about his notions “affecting the fluidity of the theme” and “ogling my characters with unnecessary detail”. I knew better, but for a few minutes, I had forgotten.
My mood was effecting my driving, and I had all the sorts of defensiveness a green writer might carry. At one dismal point in the conversation, and as it turned out, the final point, I voiced with spite: “You produce the shows and I write the stories. Stay in your office and I’ll stay in mine,” and as if the universe sought to place its own sort of period at the end of that silly harangue, the entire passenger side of my car scraped against a retaining wall and we stopped with force, the front end perched against a devastated lamp-post.
We exited the wrecked car and our argument was manifest. What had been a rambling over story had become an automobile accident in less time than a nostril requires to fully flare. I opened the trunk to check on my typewriter, which turned out to be fine. While the trunk was open, however, Arlie was able to view my subsistence, my commuter life, the shoddy heaps of underwear and neckties, snack food packages, and the iron with its cord tangled up in all of it like a constricting snake. This was all the debris of my traveling habit, and accoutrements to the grueling and constant, six-hundred and fifty mile commutes from Ohio to New York for work. The argument over story ended abruptly. Arlie stared into my trunk and then looked up at me.
“Brother, you gotta relocate,” he told me.
After some talk with two policemen and a pull truck, we managed to get ourselves to the bar by taxi, where Arlie delighted in telling every detail of the accident, the argument, and especially doting on those portions of the story that involved the contents of my trunk. Worse than this embarrassing, ongoing recount of our accident, Martin Ward was there, someone I had badly wanted to meet, and a person who, to a beginning writer, was one of the men to know. Arlie went on and on about the underwear, the iron, the garbage wrappings, and my earnest worry over the state of my typewriter.
“So I’m seein’ a pair of white briefs with a leaky quart of oil sittin’ on ‘em. Leaky! Who could wear those the way they’re stained? Do you actually put those on, Asher?”
I was mortified, but no longer defensive. I had lost that adrenaline on the way over. Ward, a man to meet, approached me near the counter after several beers and put his arm around me, seeing my ongoing distress at the day’s events and the exposing of my lousy travel life. My nerves were a mess, from the argument, the wreck, and now the embarrassment of literally having my ‘dirty laundry’ exposed. Ward could see I was beginning into a state of half-drunk panic.
“Look,” he said, “nobody cares how you drive or what you got in your trunk. Calm down. All they care about is your work and how it affects their work. Outside of that, this is just a bunch of guys at a bar, and you’re one of ‘em. Relax. We have a great script and you wrote it.” He gave me a slap on the back then and ordered another beer. We had a few and then I hailed a taxi to the train station and bought a ticket back to Ohio for the weekend. It was an eye-opening experience and effected me in ways not at first discernible. It may seem silly or novice now, but that accident and the brief talk with Martin Ward was truly the first time I felt to be an actual part of the television world, and in any way connected to others in the game. Until that day, I had felt merely to be an interloper, a sort of industry tourist or an unattractive suitor, one that managed to find a bit of luck here and there, but would not be around for long.
On the path to enterprise, and especially in the television business, a writer meets many accomplices. Through these, he is given occasional memberships to sources of work that exist all over town. You cherish these and use them when needed. Who you know does not make you a good writer, but simply more visible. This is a necessity; a good writer that knows no one is a ghost before death. When your mind is a bit cracked and your days bent from exhaustion or the incessant rummaging in yourself for meaning, these people have a treasury of advice and can direct you toward work. They usually bring it out when you’re in trouble, which is the exact right moment to do so. A slap on the back and a simple statement are often all a writer needs to continue against the wind. Uncertainty and struggle are tough on everyone in the television industry, but due to his nature, and emotional aptitude, the stuff of creativity, a writer is all the more susceptible to his bridge groaning beneath those weights. People like Martin Ward, and even Arlie Waller, came along enough that I was propelled forward. Were I to write a short script of my life, these accomplices would have a scene of their own, and if my life went over budget, I wouldn’t shorten that scene or give them less lines, not for anything.
Of course, we all have the withery weeks. What summer ushers onto the limbs is dry and weak by autumn. A writer goes through his own private seasons, and there is little warning of when these times will be upon him. Sometimes they wake and hunt him to the month. The writer goes nowhere and looks around and comes back. Then he goes somewhere. Failure is a bit like reconnaissance.
There was a half of a year, shortly after that incident with Arlie and Martin Ward, where a time of rejection sought to comb my hair from my head. I had a drought of money and I was unable to sell anything. Meals suffered, mood dwindled, and my family was given to finding me always in a sort of false cheer that they could see through with ease. A blank page was no longer my comrade in occupation, but had taken on the grim hue of an adversary. I wrote unremittingly, but no one was buying. The uncertainty was overwhelming. The mail would come and I would lean against the kitchen counter in a sort of unfocused surrender while opening the rejections and cancellations. It was a rough six months, and I began to doubt whether I was still viable as a scriptwriter.
One afternoon, I was surprised to discover a letter from Ted Miller. He was a choice producer, a sort of walking trophy for the art of the anthology show, and he still is. I had sent him a script and, for a long duration, had received no response. Finally, Miller’s response came in the mail, and I was certain it would be a rejection. Miller, however, did not reject my script. He wanted not only what I had sent him, but more scripts from me in the near future. He asked that I fly to New York and have a meeting with him, and I did so, a volume of manuscripts on the verge of bursting from my cheap briefcase. They were all I brought, not even a change of clothes. Just months prior, Beth and I had been sitting in the white radiance of our television watching The Bluejackets, and I had remarked how much I would like to work with a producer of that capability, with that sort of large budget, how wondrous it would be to work with someone like Ted Miller.
There I was, at bat with everything I could muster, nervously inhabiting my body in his office. We had two meetings, the first of which had me feeling like a good actor that had been written terrible, phony lines. I found myself sounding like the pitchmen I had disliked so much in my radio days. The second meeting was genuine, and I felt more like myself. Ted informed me he would be buying six of my scripts, and quite possibly more. A show was being designed and had already garnered a strong sponsor, and the series would require many scripts to keep it afloat. This was to be Ted’s show, his baby, from the ground up. He was designing a regular, ongoing gig for himself, and there would be room for others, and he was impressed with my work.
An hour later, I had tipped the bellman at my hotel with extravagance and was letting a baroque bourbon turn my skull into a lantern. I rambled to my wife across the telephone lines in all of my exuberance, and she became just as excited as I. After sobering, that same night, I wrote my way into another script. The shakiness in my knees the previous day was now steady as a concrete foundation. The mathematics in my head, even as they rumbled over the bourbon, were clear: Seven hundred dollars a story, for six scripts, and these were works already written. “And probably more, Asher. Maybe a dozen,” he had said. It felt like free money. A slot machine’s grin. It was as if I had somehow run over every base on a bunt and managed an illogical home run. I felt as if I had won the sweepstakes.
Six weeks later, while sitting in a chair at my home, I received the next letter from Miller. The show had been cancelled. My home run was rescinded. The game had been called because of snow. I had been lifted to the top of a certain mountain and then, while admiring the magnanimous view and my good fortune, had been carried by the wind right off the peak so it could watch me tumble all the way down again. And fast. I did get to work with Ted eventually, but not for the six script gambit that had invigorated us so.
Perhaps it should be said that the tantamount and viable things one can learn about writing for television are those that keep one going. The occasional foray into a series, even short, is a significant boon. An acceptance letter can motivate at just the right time. The meetings that go well but end up facing that not-so-peculiar and tragic destiny of going nowhere are a blessing, as well, as they help to train you for future meetings. You try, is all. You carry your manuscripts and offer them to whoever passes. This is exhausting but never boring and it brings your rare achievements into focus. I have learned much from the good over the past few years, but have I learned the most from the troublesome patches. The slow burn has taught me more than any firecracker could.
The Trouble with the Pecking Order
In the realm of television, I am a hack by general standard, as are all of the industry’s writers, good or bad. Go ahead and let it kink its sound from the hind teeth: Hack. In the classes that comprise television’s hierarchy, the writer is most often thought a resident of Grub Street. An underling rather than accomplice, and a janitor of words into whose mouth they’d be happy to cram a bar bit if they could. The works that leave the typewriter and the scripts that reach production are but the broth for which networks need to settle their meats, the canvas onto which a sales message can be placed, the means to commercials and the vehicle to a product’s representation in both airtime and sponsorship.
This is a medium I have taken much part in, from the start, and it is a medium still thought by many of those in its higher echelon as being foremost a delivery system and not, by traditional means, a form of art. In that mode of thinking, the television writer will never be observed a place in the consideration of art, but will be viewed in the commercial sense. I can think of no more a saddening and dangerous manner with which to consider a writer than by the laws of money. For now, in television, this is his rank. He may climb higher in time, but today, his work is the black soil in which an ad-man buries each thirty-second seed. There is room to move and create still. Despite the ad-man, notwithstanding the compromise, and though the networks divide the acreage and are stingy with the size of spade, it is still great and prolific soil.
Four Shows
On March 20th, 1955, the Carlton Cast Theatre aired the first of the shows based on the scripts in this book, All the System. It was simply another of my scripts, somewhere around my 80th, yet only the 9th to be put into production. I missed the first half of broadcast because I’d forgotten it was being aired that night. My wife and I sat down on the couch and, looking for something to watch, discovered the program mid-way through the second act. We watched the rest of the performance from the living room while I made brief trips into the kitchen to fetch beer and clove tea. My wife was suffering from an unyielding toothache, and so I was keeping eye on her as she sat and sweat in her chair, inundating myself with beer and giving her cups of the slightly anesthetic tea, one after the next. Not five minutes had passed beyond the end of the show when our phone rang. It has not ceased ringing since that moment.
I had attempted the uphill course to success, and had not done well. I was still down below, and though I did not want to wage my campaigns in the trench manner, there I was. Then it happened: The Emmy and a critical start. It is to fortune alone I must infer any success I have had with these shows. People refer to this manner of achievement as the ‘overnight success’, and I am that in many ways. A piece of writing did this, not the bulk of my work, but a single piece. All the System caught the interest of so many, their imaginations turning on it in a way I could have neither anticipated nor tried to engineer. The favor that script culled into being was not only from the viewers, but the critics. After All the System aired, I accrued a dozen offers for television assignments, all of them with little compromise. After the Emmy, another dozen came through the telephone wire, straight into my living room. Screenplays were asked for Hollywood pictures, three of them. There were two offers for possible novels and one for a collection, of which this introduction is in direct relation. In addition to these, I was invited to lunch with a couple of producers from Broadway and there were six interviews placed before me from a variety of publications. Everything that had been rejected prior to All the System began being picked up straightaway and purchased. I had been given a sudden and unexpected crown. A little one, but a crown.
While I was pleased at this attention, the constant comparison of each new show to All the System worried me, and, after time, began to deplete me. I wanted to assure people there were other shows, that I had written and was capable of far more than that one piece, but always a new work was compared to that first success. For me, what at first seemed a shower of kind words had slowly become a nail in the ego. I was not thankless by any means (quite the opposite), but I didn’t want to write more stories like All the System. I wanted to write many things, and I have and will continue to do so, but it was difficult trying to convince people that I had more in me than that first, hit program.
I continued assuring. I’ll Be Sure to Thank Them was a stronger work than any I had written previous, but the critics paled it beside All the System. I thought there was true, earthen salt in the characters of Coronach, but reviewers found the characters not as likeable as those in All the System. The accessibility of The Gardener’s Midnight came through in a sure and careful way (I spent more time with it than I had with previous scripts), and the story had a lot of style, but the only people that thought this, it turned out, were myself and my wife. I began to be referred to as “All the System writer, Emery Asher”.
There was a brief reprieve in this moniker when Naught for Heaven was performed with the Nash Television Theatre. The grandiloquent reviews for this particular piece added the title of that work to my reference, and in the present, I often hear at the outset of a public interview: “Please welcome the writer of All the System and Naught for Heaven, Emery Asher.” One need only refer to the title of the book being read at this very moment to see the extent of this: All the System and Other Works by Emery Asher. While I am no longer expected to repeat that script, its stylizations and particular sort of story, and though I have managed to make much ground with other works, I do have to accept that I might never escape the initial success of that script. It is perhaps a silly and vain complaint. I am thankful for it, of course, but must remain cautious.
Afterthoughts
Always there will be the intrusion of commercials. It is the blind spot in every mirror, being that even when you are unaware of them, they exist and have come to make grand promises and ask their small favors. A writer in television, though he may be given commercial confidence and privilege, works around the advertisers as if a museum tour guide, swaying a hand past all the luxuriant displays for each group of passers-by. Not all commercials are bad, but I dislike them. The phrase is ‘necessary evil’, and that iniquity is what pays for much of the production. I see them as a sort of outlandish uncle that likes to run his mouth, one that you simply have to put up with and, to certain extent, make happy, because he owns your house and fixes the plumbing when the drips occur. Yes, he spouts slogans and clichés, gives his elbow jars to your ribs, and passes gas loudly at the dinner table. Yes, he has his outbursts and winks, and is in the habit of talking down to you as if you were a child that couldn’t possibly understand anything beyond a jingle in his favor. Yes, he inconveniences you, and you wish he were a different sort of person, but he is still your uncle and you are still reliant on him. He is the lord of your particular slum, and he is family. Each of you needs the other, no matter how many frowns and arguments are involved.
This book contains no commercials, though it also comes without their money, which means no actors, score, or set, which is the isolated nature of print. I have taken the reign in these areas by way of introduction. I’m the director in this particular endeavor, as well as the host, and even the mic-handler. What I hope you will enjoy are four of my works, chosen with the aid of J. S. Kemp, a gracious editor and one who’s opinion could sway anyone onto his side in most matters. In addition to All the System, you’ll find The Gardener’s Midnight, Naught for Heaven, and Coronach. All four of these plays have been set into a readable type and they contain a few production notes on their original airings. It is my earnest hope you find in these something you can take away with you, and I am grateful for your attention and interest. It has made me what I am.
Emery Asher, 1958