HARLAN ELLISON’S MOVIE
This week, we begin a mad adventure. How many weeks it will take to run its course I don’t know. Past experience with The Glass Teat advises me you’ll enjoy the trip, but a few words of explanation can’t hurt.
Twice during the two and a half year run of The Glass Teat I used scripts I had written for television as segments of the column. The first was a treatment—a synopsis—of a proposed script for The Name of the Game. It was never put into script, but it turned out to be a good piece of craft information not only for those who had aspirations as tv writers, but for those who had very little understanding of the steps through which a scenarist goes in preparing a typical tv segment.
The second such offering was a complete publication of the original teleplay of my segment of The Young Lawyers. I ran it as a sort of protection of my reputation. I knew it would get butchered in the studio hopper, and I wanted those who knew and enjoyed my work to see what it looked like before the assassins got at it. It ran in five or six installments, an act at a time, and it was followed by an installment of the column discussing how it looked when it was aired. Readers advised me they’d saved the installments and had compared them with the show as they watched it over ABC. There was a universal moan of horror from them pursuant to what they’d read as opposed to what they’d seen.
But again, it was enlightening for those who wanted to write tv scripts and apparently fascinating to those who had no idea a writer puts all those clever words in the actors’ mouths, not to mention many of those clever angles put into the director’s camera.
This time, I offer a full motion-picture script. It will take more than six installments to run it, because it’s a long movie; but I think you will find it socially redeeming and intellectually challenging. Also maybe funny. And look on the bright side: I won’t miss any deadlines!
The history of the film is simple: I was approached by Marvin Schwartz (the producer of The War Wagon, 100 Rifles, Hard Contract, the sensational television movie Tribes, and two forthcoming films, Welcome Home, Soldier Boys and Kid Blue), who proposed that I write a film I’d always wanted to write. Marvin suggested a basic theme, a dropout who inherits his father’s bank, and then he turned me loose. I wrote the film at 20th Century-Fox, though it was a personal project of Marvin’s, and I must state categorically that it was the happiest liaison with a producer I’ve ever had. Marvin was quick and intuitive and had a sure story-sense that never failed. He was hip enough to leave me to my own devices most of the time and the one time he offered a suggestion for a possible story-line it was to ask me if there had ever been a scene I’d wanted to write into a film, a scene that no one had ever let me use. I began grinning and said yes, there had been one scene I’d written into three different films that had been excised early on because the producers had deemed it too berserk for human consumption. Marvin urged me to use it in our movie. And I did. After the final installment of the script runs in these pages, I’ll answer any questions you readers may have, and I’ll tell you which of the many scenes in the film is the one Marvin insisted I write. You may make wild guesses if you choose.
One further word. This film has not been produced. At the time it was written, three years ago, it was fresh and of-the-times. Then the studios, who had ripped off the subculture shamelessly in their attempts to commercialize the Easy Rider ambience, who had lost their shirts on such horrors as The Strawberry Statement, R.P.M., The Revolutionary and other dumb, arteriosclerotic hypes, decided “relevance” wasn’t relevant any longer, and they abandoned the culture of the streets, to the mutual relief of the street people and the banks that financed the films. There are sections of this film, therefore, that may seem dated. They would have to be redone if the film were to be produced today. But in the main, I would alter this script very little. Even the mad thought that it would take something like eight million dollars to produce it doesn’t scare me. New film and videotape techniques make this movie produceable at a reasonable budget.
If anyone cares, I think it’s one of the three best things I ever wrote for the visual media. So personal a script is it, that I titled it accordingly; and though Marvin—flabbergasted at my arrogance—at first balked at my title, when the chips were down he threw up his hands and agreed that what I had produced from my rancid cesspool of a mind was so ellisonian in nature, there could logically be no other title for the film than