INSTALLMENT 19: 1 MARCH 82

 

Gobbledygook on Olympus

As one with Jacques Barzun, Willard Espy, Edwin Newman and John Simon, long have I confessed to this obsessive love affair with the English language. Fer sure, I rilly love it a whole lot! Long have I inveighed against the incorrect use of “hopefully” and the cretinous “at this point in time.” Oh, wow, I’m rilly into it! Jangling to my delicate nervous system is the pronunciation of noo-cue-lerr.

Molly Haskell, one of the film critics for the New York Times, has written, “Language: the one tool that enables us to grasp hold of our lives and transcend our fate by understanding it.” Hey, I’ll go for that. Fer sure.

Well, given all of that, you can just imagine my surprise when I was hit by a falling buzzword the other day. It came out of nowhere; and like a deadly dum-dum, it had my name on it.

And what it was, was this:

A representative of a large talent agency called a tv network executive, and when he got the man’s secretary on the line he asked her (direct quote), “Is he speakable?”

Let us pause for an instant. What is creeping toward us will not be deterred by an instant’s pause. When we get back to it in the next paragraph, it’ll still be slithering ahead. Trust me. But do pause with me for this excerpt from a little book called LANGUAGE IN AMERICA: “Let us define a semantic environment as any human situation in which language plays a critical role. This means that the constituents of the environment are (1) people, (2) their purposes, and (3) the language they use to help them achieve their purposes. Because there are many different human purposes, there are, of course, many different kinds of semantic environments. Science is a semantic environment. So is politics; commerce; war; love-making; praying; reporting; law-making; etc. Each of these situations is a context in which people want to do something to, for, with, or against other people, and in which the communication of meaning (language) plays a decisive role. A healthy semantic environment is one in which language effectively serves the purposes of the particular context in which it is used…. The semantic environment is polluted when language obscures from people what they are doing and why they are doing it.”

Is he speakable!?! No, you chimpanzee, he’s unspeakable!

What slithers toward us is the miasma of semantic pollution that creeps in on little cat feet, takes a shit, and creeps on. The context is the film / tv industry. The language is ever increasingly more oppressive obscurantism, euphemisms, buzzwords, jingoism and looney tune psychobabble.

God (or Whoever’s in charge) knows it’s hard enough carrying on an intelligible conversation with producers, studio executives, agents, network vice-presidents and those who call themselves “packagers” (whatever the hell that means) when, for the most part, and despite their cloak of arrogance, they haven’t the vaguest idea what they’re talking about. Add to the unassailable perception that far too many of these paladins of power have the intellectual capacity of an artichoke, and their determination to speak in a tongue best described as Functional Imbecilic…and you find yourself in a world of verbiage that would stun even Lenny, the slow-wit of Steinbeck’s OF MICE AND MEN.

As self-appointed mad dog yapping at the heels of the verbally underprivileged, I have solicited samples of current Show Biz Talk from a dozen different sources in The Industry. None of whom wish to be named.

Here’s a beauty. Two agents walking into the Academy Theater the other night. The first one says, “I’ll be damned if I know what Paramount’s buying these days.” The second one replies, “Well, fer sure, they don’t want anything soft.” And the first one concurs. “Yeah, they want hard center.”

Translation, as best I can piece it together after long analysis with philologists, is this: “soft” originally meant any motion picture that was a story about people. Such films as Resurrection, Kramer vs. Kramer, or My Bodyguard. Small films. Personal stories. But the term has come to be a denigrative in these times of “hard center” films such as Raiders of the Lost Ark, Smokey and the Bandit, or Animal House that clean up at the box office. In a “hard center” film, I’m given to understand, development of character goes by the wayside and what becomes dominant is—and here’s another one—the plunge. Meaning: throw it at ’em fast and hard and chew on their eyeballs.

Offshoot of “hard center” in television is “high concept” as in the phrase uttered by an ABC programmer recently, “Don’t try to sail anything by me that isn’t high concept.”

What means this? An associate producer of tv mini-series told me the perfect example of a “high concept” series is The Dukes of Hazzard.

“You’ve got to be pulling my gotkes,” I said. “That series is as empty of thought as Phyllis Schlafly’s social conscience.”

“Wrong,” she replied. “It’s high concept because there’s nothing else like it. No imitators.” (Allah be praised, I murmured.) What “high concept” means, in the word of gibberish, is non-replicable. Done once, and impossible to imitate.

Further. In The Industry people are either “hot” or “not hot.” No in-between. You get hired or not hired that simply.

These days a “producer” does many things, but producing a film ain’t one of them. For that, you need a “line producer.” By classtime tomorrow, students, write down a list of what it is that a “producer” does do these days. See if you can fill one side of a postage stamp.

“Let’s cut a deal,” they say. They also say, “We cut the film together.” I think they mean they edited it. Cut and together are mutually contradictory. Out here in syntax country, us rubes call that an oxymoron. And an oxymoron, as we all know, is blemish cream to remove zits from stupid people. At least where I come from. “Let’s take a meeting,” they say. “Great,” I reply. “Where shall we take it? And will we have to carry it yonder portage overland dorten or can we simply send it Federal Express?”

“What’s this character’s franchise?” That’s a new one. It is a phrase spoken by network executives on the buying end of a hustle from some independent producing entity. (I love that “entity” thing. I always picture something like the creature from Alien, all drool and mad staring eyes.) What means this word “franchise”? It meaneth, I’m told, what is the character’s occupation, and is it an occupation that allows for unlimited stories in a continuing series? Newspaper reporters have a “franchise.” Lady private eyes, wryly witty doctors, airline stewardesses, unjustly convicted prison escapees, cross-country truckers—we’re talking here highly plungeable franchises. Optometrists, certified public accountants, shoe salesmen and ornithologists are definitely “not hot.”

“Is he talkable?”

“Let me put a phone call in your stead.”

“This deal is a highly seductive situation.”

“It’s a deal-breaker.”

Then there’s the concept of the “rolling break,” a creation of the late David Begelman, a model for us all not only of rectitude and high-profile hard-center ethical behavior, but of astonishing mutations in the spoken word. The “rolling break” (which I am given to understand is a creature of myth much like the unicorn, elves, gnomes, leprechauns and Ronald Reagan’s concern for the poor) is an element of a deal whereby at certain levels of profit by the producing entity, the party entitled to a “rolling break” gets certain amounts of profit-participation. I’ve always wanted to participate in a profit; orgies have become so enervating.

The semantic environment is polluted when language obscures from people what they are doing and why they are doing it.

When the Press Secretary for the President of the United States says, on Monday, “We have no intention of sending troops into any foreign country,” and on Tuesday says, “Yesterday’s statements are inoperative,” and we don’t rise up in our wrath to defenestrate the sonofabitch, what we are doing is letting him say, “What I told you yesterday was a flat-out, bald-faced lie and today I’m saying just the opposite.”

And when a minion of some producing entity suggests we take an “if-come deal” and we don’t leap across the desk to strangle him or her with his or her own Cardin ascot, we are letting him or her say, “We’ll take your talent for free, and we’ll blue-sky it, and if someone at the web leaps up to bite it, and we cut a deal, we’ll give you a full card as ‘creator’ and your Tony Bills and your Michael Douglases and your Norman Lears will all know that you’re hot!”

To which we can all reply, hopefully, at that point in time, “Fer sure!”

Bearing in mind that we are dealing with creatures all drool and mad staring eyes, for whom human speech is not their natural tongue.