INTRODUCTION
Crying "Water!" In A Crowded Theater

 

PART ONE:
In Which The Critic Blames It All On A Warped Childhood

Of me, the question is often asked.

Humphrey Bogart to John Derek in 1949's Knock on Any Door: "Where did you go wrong, kid?"

Pat O'Brien to Billy Halop, Leo Gorcey, Bobby Jordan, Gabe Dell, Bernard Punsley and Huntz Hall in 1938's Angels with Dirty Faces: "Where did you kids go wrong?"

Patricia Neal to Paul Newman in 1963's Hud: "Where did you go wrong?"

Gazing on the imperfect handiwork, gibbering assistant Dwight Frye to Herr Doktor Victor F. in 1931's Frankenstein: "I don't want to second-guess you, Doc, but do you think it was smart to sew the left hand onto his forehead?"

Having reached middle age and having made the journey having accrued a modest degree of fame, some might say celebrity, others might say noteworthiness or renown (not to mention the guy over there with the placard that says infamy), of me, the question is often asked: "Where did you go wrong, kid?"

I take this opportunity to put the matter to rest. It cannot be blamed on my late mom and dad, Serita and Louis Laverne Ellison. As nice a pair of midwestern parents as one could hope to have had cleaning up after one's adolescence; they did the best they could, having birthed something that might better have starred in a Larry Cohen film. Opprobrium should not be visited on the many bigots, anti-Semites, dunderheads and random whelps who made my youth in Painesville, Ohio seem like the lost chapters of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling or The Sickness Unto Death. I survived their tender mercies with nothing more debilitating to show for it than a lifelong blood-drenched obsession for revenge. Responsibility should not be laid at the door of evil companions, drug addiction, rampant alcoholism or tertiary syphilis; nor that of mind-polluting pornography, prolonged exposure to strict religious training, the evils of the Big City or snug Jockey shorts. Where I went wrong, how I first flouted the rules, when I turned from the path of righteousness and became the case study before you today, redounds solely to the legendary animators Dave and Max Fleischer, and an obscure feature-length cartoon they made in 1941 titled Mr. Bug Goes to Town.

Oh, yes, to be sure, there will be those among you on the jury who will scoff, sneer, and flick fish scales in demonstration of your rejection of this plea. Walk a mile in my snowshoes, I say, before you deal thus harshly with a poor, unfortunate symphoric nyctalopian, come at the dwindling twilight of his life to a state of repentance and hiatus hernia. Ah, you nullifidians, you!

I tell you truly: it was Mr. Bug Goes to Town (seen once in a while in the Sunday morning kiddie TV ghetto as Hoppity Goes to Town, the British title), an animated entomological extravaganza recounting the angst-ridden travels and travails of a grasshopper and other anthropomorphized insects, that first warped a sweet, theretofore-angelic child. It happened, exactly and precisely, as burned forever in memory, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941. My seventh birthday. Stop building that gibbet for a minute, and I'll tell you.

 

My grandparents on my mother's side—a pair of kindly sexagenarians only slightly less lovable than Burke & Hare—lived in that then-charming section of Cleveland Heights known as Coventry-Mayfield. (It was called thus, because it was the area where Coventry Road intersected with Mayfield. I mention this, a seemingly obvious dollop of minutiae, only for those of you who have grown to maturity in a time rife with such portmanteau words as Sea-Tac for an airport serving Seattle and Tacoma; Wiltern, a theater at the confluence of Western Avenue and Wilshire Boulevard; and Flojo, an apartment house owned by Florence and Joseph Ellenbogen; and other blendwords of this sort that form a part of the lingua non franca committed in America today.)

Until the age of three or four or five, something like that, I had resided in a state of baby, right there, Coventry-Mayfield. But we had moved thirty miles northeast to the squalid hamlet of Painesville before I hit six, and every week or so visited Gramma Adele and Grampa Harry (who never, as best I recall, ever smiled at me save when they were doling out chicken beaks and feet onto my plate at the Passover seders I was compelled under pain of dismemberment to attend) who still lived on Hampshire Road in Cleveland. I looked on these visits with all the childlike joy one experiences at the prospect of a sigmoidoscopy. As I recall, I adopted a standard response, when alerted to an upcoming hegira to the Grandfolks Rosenthal, that involved threatening to slash my wrists with the rusty pin that backed my Official Lone Ranger pedometer.

Nonetheless, with the sensitivity all parents demonstrate when their kids threaten to eat worms or hold their breath till they turn blue, I was schlepped to Cleveland regularly from Painesville and, when my parents went out for the evening, I was put to bed at the residence of The Ancient Jews from Hell, feigning sleep but lying alert for a sudden dive through a window at the first scent of beaks and feet.

In that neighborhood a mere forty-eight years ago, just seven months before Pearl Harbor, there existed now-lost and barely recalled establishments whose names alone send a thrill through me even today: Coventry Drugs (where I bought my first issue of Street & Smith's Shadow magazine), Uberstine's Drug Store (where one could get three scoops of sherbet, all different flavors, in a cup cone, for 11¢), Benkowitz's Deli (in the days when the corn rye they used to make a combination corned beef and pastrami was so festooned with caraway seeds that one picked at one's teeth for six weeks thereafter) and . . .

The Heights Theater.

It was one of those small neighborhood cinemas built during the moviegoing explosion of the late Twenties/early Thirties. In retrospect, I know it was a modest house of movies, but it was glorious and gigantic to me at age seven. Out front the display windows held not only one-sheets and lobby cards in full color, but at least four scene cards in black and white from each and every film showing or coming. The ticket booth resembled a private stateroom on Cleopatra's barge, tenanted (as I recall) by a young woman so gorgeous and platinum blonde that merely laying down a dime for a ducat became an act of sexual congress intense enough to send the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart to the eighth and innermost circle of Dante's inferno. The candy counter traded in ambrosia and nectar, Chuckles and Forever Yours, popcorn freshly erupted every half hour and slathered with real butter. The scent of it could have distracted warring armies.

And the seats . . . and the usherettes . . . and the screen . . . and the ceiling mural . . . oh, how I loved that movie house, as I loved the Lyric and the Utopia and the RKO Palace . . .

Going to the movies was all the books in the library at once. It was an event. Even having to go in the company of one's parents was something Halliburton would chronicle. And going alone . . . ! To be permitted to venture forth toward that mystic shrine all alone, pocket jingling with dime for ticket and three nickels for candy and popcorn; to know one could go into the Men's Room and not have to accompany one's mother into the Women's (oh god the humiliation); to select a seat way down front that produced a headache and neck-strain guaranteed to keep the Mayo Clinic solvent for three generations, a seat so far down front that one's parents would threaten you with having to cut the grass for a month if one didn't sit back in the middle "where any normal person can see."

Going to the movies alone was exciting; it was dangerous; it was, aw hell, it was Grown Up! And that was only for the Saturday matinee. But to go to a movie alone at night . . . !

Herman Kahn tagged it. Thinking about the Unthinkable.

Thus it came to pass, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941, that my parents hied me to Cleveland. On my birthday! On my bloody canyoubelieveit goddam birthday!. Of all days to have to go to Cleveland. But wait! Can it be? Could the universe have taken a nanoinstant from its rigorous schedule of creating galaxies and hedgehogs, pulsars and pips in oranges, to say, "Aw, what the hell," and to proffer a respite in the pissrain that is s.o.p. for little kids? Could it be that I would find myself only three blocks away from the mysterious and glamorous Heights Theater on the exact specific day of my birthday?

For this was the jewel, my friends:

It was the policy of the beloved Heights Theater to provide free admission (let me rephrase that: FREE!!!ADMISSION!!!) for any child previously signed up on that date as his natal designation.

It had never happened before. I'd always been in Painesville on May 27th. I'd often thought wistfully of being in Cleveland on my birthday, of sauntering up to the Heights Theater and saying, "Ellison's the name, birthday's m'game." And they would lift up the big register wherein were listed all the fortunate kiddies who lived within a reasonable distance of the Heights, whose birthdays entitled them to a free movie, and they would smile and say, "Harlan Ellison. Yes, here you are. Do, please enter, as our guest; and would you like a complimentary bag of our finest popcorn, it's the fragrant 5:30 pressing, from the sunny side of the machine." And the assistant manager in his impeccable tux, and a coltish gamine of an usherette in her livery, would march me down to the seat right up under the screen, and bid me enjoy myself in extremis.

I could not believe my good fortune.

So when we hit that Slough of Despond called Gramma's House (formerly tenanted by the Ushers), I rummaged about till I found a newspaper, and checked what was playing at the Heights.

Be still my heart!

It might have been a grownup's movie. It might have been A Woman's Face, with a script by Donald Ogden Stewart, directed by George Cukor, starring Joan Crawford, Melvyn Douglas and Conrad Veidt; it might have been Tobacco Road, written by Nunnally Johnson from Erskine Caldwell's novel, directed by John Ford, and starring Gene Tierney, Marjorie Rambeau, Charley Grapewin and Dana Andrews; it might have been Ziegfeld Girl with that great Busby Berkeley "You Stepped Out of a Dream" dance number, and Lana Turner and Hedy Lamarr and Judy Garland and Jimmy Stewart; it might have been Citizen Kane or Shaw's Major Barbara with Wendy Hiller and Rex Harrison; or Mary Astor and Bette Davis in The Great Lie; or Meet John Doe or Singapore Woman or The Lady Eve. And I wouldn't have been doing too badly with any of those—except maybe Singapore Woman which, though it featured Heather Angel, starred Brenda Marshall, whom I never could stand—because they are all films I came to love in later years. But they were grownups' movies. I was seven. Sitting through the antics of Edward Arnold or Henry Daniell or Eve Arden or Barbara Stanwyck at age seven would've been something I'd do—because it was a movie, because it was my birthday, because I'd be seeing a movie at night—but the worm would certainly have gnawed my apple. It might have been a forgettable night. But . . .

Be still my heart!

The film that was showing at the Heights Theater on my seventh birthday, on Tuesday, May 27th, 1941, was a full-length animated feature, Mr. Bug Goes to Town, produced by Max Fleischer, who had earlier dazzled me with Gulliver's Travels and three double-length Popeye cartoons in which that greatest of all salts had met Sindbad, Aladdin and Ali Baba, directed by his brother, Dave Fleischer who would, within the year, knock my socks off with Superman cartoons that are spectacular even today, close on half a century later. The perfect movie for a birthday boy who, in that time of greater innocence, had seen the three Disney feature-lengths, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, and Pinocchio, and the Fleischer Bros.'s Gulliver's Travels, who was yet five months away from seeing Dumbo, who was living through the Golden Age of Animation, first-run, but didn't know it. The universe had selected the absolutely best choice for a movie to be seen at that special moment in my life. A nexus, a linch pin, a watershed; a turbid moment through which the dim future could be seen only vaguely; a branching of the path.

We're talking here about an important moment, y'know?

So I asked my parents, since they were going off to have dinner with friends, if they would drive me the few blocks to the Heights Theater, onaccounta it was my birthday and the Heights would let me in free onaccounta it was my birthday and they had this extra-special thing for kids who were having a birthday and once a year on their birthday they could see a movie for free and it was a cartoon movie, a special birthday coincidence treat that would mean a lot onaccounta it's my birth . . .

It was dark outside already. It was evening. Which preceded night. I was seven years old. Go out at night, all alone, to sit in a movie theater by yourself, and how do you manage to come home those three deadly blocks, who'll come to get you, and what happens if you're kidnapped?

I would have received a more kindly reception had I asked permission to go join the British forces defending the Suez Canal from Lieut. General Erwin Rommel's panzer Afrika Corps.

It was decided on the spot, among my parents, grandparents and assorted relatives including Uncle Morrie, Aunt Babe, Aunt Alice and whoever Aunt Alice was dating at the time, that I would spend my birthday not in the animated embrace of the Fleischers and their gavotting grasshopper, but 'neath the sheets of the spare bedroom, trembling in expectation of the Lovecraftian horrors of beaks and feet.

And so it came to pass that I was stripped to my underwear and placed in the bed, kissed goodnight at the fucking ridiculous hour of 6:00 (showtime was 7:00 at the Heights, the newspaper had advised), and urged to sleep tight with the usual admonition not to let the bedbugs bite. Bedbugs, hell, I thought: beaks and feet, beaks and feet! The door was closed, I was left in darkness in a house whose only other inhabitants were a pair of Russian immigrants whose grand-parently bodies had been taken over by Aliens from the Kid-Hating Planet.

It was then, in that half hour between being relegated to my bed of pain, and the leavetaking of my parents, that I Went Wrong.

Previously, I had been the very model of a Horatio Alger child. Goodhearted, free-spirited, clean and neat; the only kid of my acquaintance who did not step on anthills or tie tin cans to puppy dog tails. But at that instant, lying there musing on the nature of the child-adult liaison, considering the state of the universe and only dimly beginning to understand the concept injustice . . . I was driven to a burgeoning sense of Self, and was stripped of my innocence, flensed of my trust in the omnipotence of adults. I Went Wrong.

In the dark I slipped out of bed, found my clothes, got dressed, opened the bedroom window, climbed out and hung by my fingertips from the sill, dropped to the ground, and ran off into the night. It was my birthday, goddammit, and I was entitled to the free movie I'd been promised. It would be wasteful not to take advantage of the prize. Mr. Harlan Goes to Town!*

 

*The aphorist Olin Miller has written: "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory." In the course of writing this bit of memoir, reference to the noted film critic and historian Leonard Maltin, and to a book on the Fleischers by Leslie Cabarga, made it clear that since Mr. Bug Goes to Town was not released till December 4th 1941, I could not possibly have seen it one hundred and ninety-two days earlier on May 27th. Nonetheless, memories of this pivotal incident in my otherwise stale, dull, and flatly uneventful life are blazingly clear. This happened before we went to war with Japan following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th. Don't tell me I'm getting senile, I don't want to hear it. The simple explanation that I saw the movie in May of 1942, on my eighth birthday, rather than my seventh, is ridiculous, Maltin! A first-run feature being shown five months after initial release in a time when they were making five hundred films a year and they had to change the bill at least three times a week?!? Not to mention, Leonard, that it's highly unlikely they'd be showing a cartoon feature, no matter how "adult," at an evening performance on a Wednesday night five months later! No, I think not. Rather, it falls to me—however reluctantly and with apologies to all those whose historical writings must now be cast into question—to reveal a hitherto-undiscovered conspiracy on the part of Maltin, Cabarga, Time magazine, The New York Times, Walt Lee, Paramount Pictures, Photoplay and your mother and father to wipe out an entire year in the early Forties, for what nefarious reason I cannot even guess. I find this all terribly disturbing, of course, but if it comes to a point of doubting What I Know To Be True, from the source of flawless recollection, as opposed to the alleged "evidence" of recorded history, well, my example is set by all those Fundamentalist and Charismatic Christians who know damned well that the time and date of The Creation by God was 4004 B.C., on the 26th of October, at exactly 9:00 A.M., as calculated by Archbishop Ussher in 1654, despite all the bogus "evidence" of geology, astronomy, paleontology, zoology, DNA-tracing, archaeology, radiocarbon dating, uranium and thorium soil-decay calculations, not to mention X-ray microscopy in 3-D, all of which implacably attest to the age of the Earth as 4.55 billion years, not to mention the thousands of rational men and women who come forward each week to attest to having been kidnapped by aliens who sucked out their brains and replaced the gray matter with crunchy peanut butter (pant! gasp!), yet . . . in the face of all that do you think I'm going to believe I've made a mistake? Not on your tintype. Besides, I slept late on the 26th and didn't start the job till almost ten o'clock.

 

 

I was enthralled by the animated efforts of the insectile tenants in that weedy patch of earth "just 45 inches from Broadway" as they struggled to escape the skyscraper-erecting encroachments of Man, when the flashlight beam hit me in the face.

At first it was only an annoyance, a faint distraction to my right. But it persisted, and I glanced toward the aisle and got the flash right in the face. "That's him," I heard my Grandmother say; and then a younger female voice, an authentic Ajax Usherette Training School voice, whispery so as not to disturb the other patrons, yet husky and compelling, said, "Come out here, little boy."

Blinded by the light, paralyzed by the voice of authority, and not yet completely the scofflaw I was to become through this escapade, I began to tremble. "Come out here this instant, little boy!" The usherette was not to be trifled with. This young woman would no doubt grow up to be the head nurse in a maximum security nuthouse dedicated to straightening out guys like Jack Nicholson. "Harlan," my Grandmother said helpfully. "His name is Harlan Ellison."

(Yes, Officer, my dear old sweet Granny would say to the Secret Police when they came for me, he's the one you want. And the evidence is buried under all his dirty socks and underwear at the back of the clothes closet. Swell old lady.)

"Herman; you come out here, Herman Nelson."

Gramma: "Harlan."

Usherette: "What?"

Gramma: "Harlan, not Herman. Harlan Ellison, not Herman Nelson."

Patron: "Shhhh!"

Usherette: "Harmon, I don't want to have to come in there to get you!"

Gramma: "It's not Harmon, it's Harlan."

Usherette: "Whatever! Get out here, little boy!"

I got out there . . . before my darling Grandmother began handing out Wanted leaflets to the audience.

By the ear, like something from an Our Gang comedy, I was dragged up the aisle. What an ignominious reverse-path from my entrance to the Heights Theater.

I had run like a mad thing through the streets of Coventry-Mayfield, reaching the theater ten minutes before Mr. Bug was to begin. I'd given my name to the ethereal vision in the ticket booth, and she had looked it up and, smiling wonderfully, had told me to go right in, as she handed me a "birthday pass" that entitled me to free popcorn.

The young woman at the door had waved me in with another of those smiles that made the spine deliquescent, I'd bought a Tootsie Roll and accepted my free popcorn, and had allowed the charming usherette to show me to my seat, right in the middle of the third row. The theater had been pretty well filled, but even under such exacting circumstances the theater's staff had treated me properly as visiting royalty. It was, after all, as I told each person in my row as I shoved my way to my seat, my birthday!

And now, to be usherhandled up the aisle, my ear pincered excruciatingly, my dear sweet Granny kvetching along behind, intoning half-Yiddish gardyloos about my certain future as either a demented hunchbacked bell-ringer, or a Cossack love-slave . . . how ignominious!

I was, of course, dragged the three blocks back to the House of Pain, my wrist caught in a lobster-grip so maliciously tight that it would have drawn clucks of admiration from SWAT teams and Argentinian death squads. I was thrust through the front door into the presence of Grampa Harry, who was reading the Jewish Daily Forward, probably "A Bintel Brief," as he reminisced about the happy-go-lucky past in Russia filled with kasha and the grinding of the faces of the poor under the boots of the Tsar's kulaks. He looked up only long enough to spit the word oysvorf! And went back to the newspaper.

Brandishing a Swingline Stapler with which she threatened to attach me permanently to the mattress, I was once again divested of my clothing, and condemned to a state of supine anguish with threats of a "k-nok in the kopf"if I so much as hyperventilated too loudly.

I waited all of three minutes. Then I crept to the bedroom door, cracked it a sliver and listened. They were in the living room, and had just tuned in to Fibber McGee and Molly. I could hear Harlow Wilcox extolling the virtues of Johnson's Wax.

I located the contraband skeleton key where I'd hidden it a year or more earlier, under the rug beneath the bed, and unlocked the closet where my Grandmother (on whom Dickens had modeled his character Madame Defarge) had thrown my clothes in a heap on the floor. I dressed quickly, made it out through the window again, and raced back to the Heights Theater.

How I explained to the woman at the door that I was supposed to be there, I cannot remember. But I was adapting swiftly, metamorphosing in just one evening into a creature as sly and tricksy as a television network executive; and I conned my way inside. I got past the usherette somehow, hid out in a different area of the seats than the one previously discovered by the posse, and settled down with my thumb in my mouth to see how the evil C. Bagley Beetle and his two thugs, Smack the Mosquito and Swat the Fly, conspired to mulct Mr. Bumble, the proprietor of the Honey Shop (and the father of Honey Bee, Hoppity's girlfriend), out of his property.

This time I got to watch about twenty-five minutes of the film before I saw the flashlight beam bobbing down the aisle. I ducked. They went down the right-hand aisle, across the front of the audience, and up the left-hand aisle. I was on the floor. They missed me. I stuck my head up and watched the movie from the floor. Other patrons began hissing at me. I sat in my seat. I watched, mesmerized, despite the breaks in continuity occasioned by my frequent absences and nosedives.

They snuck up on me from behind, and snatched me out of my seat. This time it was my mother, in the company of the Assistant Manager. Gramma had called her to come back from the restaurant. She was not all that free with approbation for my ingenuity and tenacity. She held me aloft by my hair like a small beast chivvied from its lair by runny-nosed hound dogs. At the entrance to the Heights, the Assistant Manager waggled a finger at my mother and enunciated the evils of Interdicting Honest Merchants in Their Attempts to Recover from the Great Depression, culminating with remarks best summed as, "Keep your loathsome brat to home, lady!"

I was jammed into the glove compartment of the family Plymouth, was freighted back to durance vile, was stripped to the skin, was dressed for bed in a monstrously oversized pair of Grampa Harry's pajamas, and was stapled by Swingline into the bed.

My mother never hit me, but the voodoo curses and vivid word-pictures of my imminent demise should I budge from the bed served to cow me. My mother left, I heard the front door slam as she rushed away back to the restaurant, and I lay there for a full five minutes before I crept to the bedroom door, cracked it and heard Bob Hope introducing Frances Langford on the radio. And in pajamas fitted by Omar the Tentmaker, I made good my Great Escape for the third time. Barefoot. Crazed with determination. Now completely a creature who would ever-after have a helluva time dealing with rules and authority.

Knowing they'd be watching for me at the front door, I circled the theater in my pajamas until I found the exit doors. One of them was ajar. I slipped inside, and went to ground in the very first row, my head tilted up at a ninety-degree angle in hopes of making some vague sense of the plight of Hoppity and the inhabitants of the bug village, now displaced by the high-steel construction, in constant danger and seeking a place to draw a safe breath. As you might well imagine, there was a shitload of identification with the bugs.

Of course, they nabbed me again.

My memory at this point becomes blurred, possibly with the recalled pain of thumbscrews and vats of boiling pitch. The night passed with all the charm of Tom Brown's School Days, and I cannot tell you how many times more I broke out, or if I did get away a fourth time. When I dream of this incident, it does seem to go on for eternities.

I never did get to see the complete Mr. Bug Goes to Town until something like the mid-Sixties when it became available on videocassette. Today I have it in my private collection, and every once in a while, far more often than the quality of the film commends, I take it down and watch it. My wife has emerged from sleep in the wee hours to find me sitting cross-legged on the living room floor, watching insects.

But had it not been for the Fleischer Brothers, I might easily have remained a sweet, obedient human being who never uttered a cross word, never saw the flaws in the commands and dicta of Authority Figures, never became so obsessed with animated cartoons and other cinematic marvels that he became a film critic . . . and might today be a registered Republican.

Had it not been for Hoppity, I might well have remained untwisted, uncorrupted, placid and pliant. I would not have been arrested as many times as I have; I would not have had as difficult a time in the Army as I had; I would not punch out television and film producers when they mess up my screenplays; and the world would have been a quieter place.

I was a helpless pawn, caught in the grip of animation evil. You can call me Hoppity.

 

PART TWO:
In Which The Critic Turns His Forepaw To Semiotic NeoMarxist Post-Feminist Post-Structuralist Lacanian Kristévan Uninvested Postmodern Deconstructionist Cine-Fabulist Scholarship Thingee Stuff

You go to a movie. You turn on the set and watch a tv show. You don't think about it. You just see it. When you rise, leave the theater or punch the remote to kill the set, if you are thinking at all, your thought is usually something no more complex than I liked that or I didn't like that. (Actually, the latter impression is more likely to be What a waste of time. I call that the Geraldo-Rivera-Opens-Al-Capone's-Vault response.)

For an appreciably smaller number of exposures to film or television, the gray matter has not been stunned, and you very likely think about what you've seen. Then I liked and I didn't like become What a terrific movie! or Gawd, I hated that, I'd like to slug the Producer, knock him down, go through his pockets, and get back the ticket money, the parking lot fee, the cost of the babysitter, and a few bucks for punitive damages!

Filmgoers and television-viewers (and their mind-sets, which are completely different) justifiably judge a work in these visual mediums by what it is, not by the intentions of those who created it. They assume that what comes to them across the screen large or small is exactly what its makers wanted it to be. They have no idea—however knowledgeable they may be in the abstract—of the disruptions, the compromises, the disappointments and artistic roadblocks that come with the territory. Nor do they care. (I'm not sure anyone should care, on one everyday level. It is surely enough that the audience has trusted the creators sufficiently, in advance, to give over their time and their money.)

But, in truth, the average member of the viewing audience would rather cobble up his/her uninformed opinion that goes beyond merely I liked or I didn't like, and visit it on anyone who'll listen, with the force of an Obiter Dictum, rather than learn what really transpired in that minefield between initial conception and final presentation, why some movie succeeded or failed, sans conspiracy paranoia or, worse, the naive rural-hayseed folderol of Those Who Never Get the Message.

Because what is being indulged is a desire to comment, to voice an opinion, in short . . . to criticize.

Considering the question from both sides of the plow—as both scenarist and critic-insider and just-like-you moviegoer—I discover, to my surprise and pleasure, that the single most important problem of film criticism, whether scholarly or casual, is easy to pin. It is the same problem from either side.

Because movies (and by extension, television) are so damned accessible—they are the "common denominator" art forms of the masses, as pulp magazines and radio dramas were before them—they lie naked to the attentions of both the wise and the foolish. Where criticism of work in the print mediums requires having to read and (one hopes) a heightened degree of insight, if not good old simple common sense, as well as (again, one can only hope) some background in the form being discussed, anyone who plonks down the price of a ticket feels equipped to pontificate on a film.

That's just fine, absolutely peachy keen, if one is making judgments about a movie while standing in the waiting line, or tossing it around at dinner or après-cinema; we all enjoy putting in our 2¢ on any topic we feel even remotely within our purview. But—and having voiced these opinions in print more than a fistful of times I'm aware of the inevitable charge of Elitism, to which charge I plead guilty, on grounds of common sense driven by pragmatism—it is a lot less salutary than "just fine, absolutely peachy keen" when those uninformed opinions are concretized as Film Criticism.

For decades it was de rigueur on most small town (and many big city) newspapers to fob off the book reviews on anyone who would do the filthy job. A stringer who handled mostly box scores of the local high school baseball teams, would pick through a stack of review copies that had found their way to a newspaper, and select something that looked like it might be worth reading. They usually weren't even paid for the "review." That became the process for film reviewing, too. A local lady who assembled the village bulletin board listings, or who held Great Books sessions at her home, would be assigned to report on whatever the town's lone moviehouse was playing this week. Or canned material, usually based on studio handouts, would be picked up from the AP, UP or INS wires. Larger papers had a "Hollywood Correspondent" who filed interviews with stars and dealt regularly in gossip.

Over time, serious film criticism began to emerge. Slowly, haltingly, and often to the bewilderment of city editors who used the material as fillers. Eventually, when a certain kind of academic began to perceive that there was Thesis Material in film criticism, a frequently infelicitous attention came to be focused on Hollywood's product. I refer here not to the serious, thoughtful, informed writings of such as James Agee, Graham Greene, Louis Delluc or Roland Barthes, but to the opportunistic scratchings of backwater Educationists (as R. Mitchell calls them) whose passion was not for the film individually or the form in toto, but merely to jump on what they cynically considered a popular culture publish-or-perish target of availability.

And they passed along their parvenu perceptions to students who, because they had plonked down the price of a ticket, also felt entitled to pontificate, unfortunately employing the arcane jingoisms and semiotically-convoluted rationales they'd picked up from bloodless instructors unconsciously determined to leach every last morsel of pleasure from the act of filmgoing.

Thus, justification for dumb remarks was institutionalized in American society. Not for the first time. Religion, politics, morality, literature . . . each in its turn has vibrated to the disturbances of air justified by the expression "I'm entitled to my opinion." As I point out in one of my essays, the important word informed is always missing from that bleat. In my ugly, Elitist opinion we are not all entitled to voice our opinions; we are entitled to pass along our informed opinions. As Anatole France once wrote, "If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing."

People who wouldn't have the chutzpah to venture a Solomonic medical diagnosis, or even proffer an opinion about why your car's engine is missing, have no compunctions or modesty when it comes to raving about, or trashing, a motion picture.

Without having read all the drafts of the screenplay before it ever got into the hands of the production personnel, the line producer, or the director, without having been present on the set to experience the million contretemps that lobby for or against the written word's transmogrification, without understanding the skills and problems that go into the sound portrait, the color corrections, the editing, the looping and dubbing, or any of the other hundred-plus elements that meld to make a movie, self-appointed mavens—judging only what they receive as they sit in the theater—do the Critical Judgment Thing. They decide this actor was lame, that director can't handle action sequences, this noble scenarist's brilliant vision has been martyred, that producer is a venal swine who has sold out Art for Commerce.

And all of it is spinach.

With a universal constituency for film, everyone feels arrogantly competent . . . no, not even competent . . . divinely inspired . . . to pass judgments down to the most minute facets of the film. At a kaffee klatsch, that's just fine. Just peachykeen. In scholarly journals, and in allegedly critical reviews, it is unacceptable.

So the problem, as I see it, that most presses us when we talk about "film scholarship" is setting minimal standards of cinematic knowledge. And I don't mean those used to hand out such horseshit awards as Golden Globes or Oscars every year.

I'm not suggesting that before someone can speak with wisdom about movies that s/he must be able to quote verbatim from Siegfried Kracauer, Paul Rotha or Terry Ramsaye (though it wouldn't hurt to have such a rich background). What I am suggesting is that the least we must demand of anyone who sets him/herself up as a critic of film, is that said Oracle strive to operate on the level of, say, Agee, Arthur Knight (of The Liveliest Art), Stanley Kauffmann, Molly Haskell, or just Pauline Kael.

This means, also, that the scholar should love film. Should adore just going to the movies, the way a kid adores going to the movies. Bearing with, a large measure of innocence; a large measure of I'll sit here, you just do it to me. Just purely love it, to the degree that s/he is willing to savage that which is inept, dishonest, historically corrupt, pretentious or simply meanspirited. That which demeans the art form. That which lies to the trusting audience. That which rusts our innocence for no greater purpose than to con us out of our ticket money and get us ready to be manipulated into laying-out for the mendacious sequels.

By this standard, I discount such critics as John Simon. As brilliant and as uncompromising as Simon's dance and legitimate stage reviews are, as correct as I think he is most of the time, as deeply as I admire his erudition and his insights and his vivid writing, to the same degree do I find his film reviews unacceptable. He clearly thinks of film as a second-class art form, and it shows in every line he writes about cinema.

(He is not alone in this dichotomous, ambivalent attitude; and more on that in a moment.)

He does not love film as he loves the theater or ballet, and his Elitism seems thus, to me, corrupt. It does not escape my sense of the self-serving or ridiculous that as an Elitist I'm saying my brand of nobler-than-thou is more peachykeen than thine or Simon's. I got that. Nonetheless, I speak of these matters and make comparisons not to contemn John Simon—whose work I find constantly thought-provoking, which is precisely what a critic is supposed to do, in my view—but to make sure the reader knows I have no secret agendas. I think it is above-all-else urgent that the reader of film criticism be able to trust that the critic is right out there, holding nothing back, being absolutely candid.

It means, also, that the kind of overintellectualized barbarism of critics-manqué who see deep, redemptive significance in Night of the Living Dead films, though they "have problems" with Brazil or Apocalypse Now, cannot be considered apropos. We must remember that Philistinism makes lucid copy for dolts, and we must resist crediting that kind of thing, lest all standards be downgraded and eventually become flummery.

I would add that most temporal concerns when judging film are also suspect. Deconstruction, a trendy way of examining films these days, coupled with Marxist Feminist Dystopic Reified Orthodontist criticism (or whatever the goony-birds are currently using to feather their vitae) is ultimately hateful and false.

So the problem, in my view, is bringing into being a cadre of film critics and film scholars whose pronouncements are based not on academic need, cynical disrespect for the art form, or hayseed arrogant ignorance, but on background, knowledge, sophistication and—most of all—affection.

It is in such spirit that Hoppity has written what you find in this book.

 

PART THREE:
In Which The Critic Attempts To Escape The Gas Chamber By Explaining His Motives, Not Raising His Voice In Anger Though Insulting Everyone In Sight, And By Explaining How He Came To This Occupation

The inescapable, core problem with writing critical comment about films is that the commentator is really given no option.

If the review is positive, if the film is something special that one wishes to inveigle the reader into actually going to see, literally conning the potential filmgoer into spending money through the seduction of words, one is limited. The word-pictures can only do so much. The restrictions are many and truly fearsome. The critic dare not give away the great scenes, dare not reveal the punch of the surprise ending or expose the killer; the critic may not hint at, or paraphrase, the memorable lines that everyone talks about interminably, at risk of robbing the movie-lover of the frisson of joyful discovery. It's as mean an act as telling the reader of a murder mystery who the culprit is, ten pages before s/he finishes the book.

The critic can only go huzzah and huzzah so many times before it becomes white noise. The critic is limited in vocabulary, because beyond a certain point it becomes dangerous and boring, and then dangerously counterproductive. Dangerous, because nothing can live up to such panegyrics; boring, because what can one say after one says don't miss it?

So the options are removed. And what one is left with is the negative, or killer, review. One can be infinitely more entertaining when savaging the unworthy, the cupidic, the inept, the dishonest. Like Spaceballs.

One can unleash the stream of liquid fire and chew a path of invective through the failed art with a candycane marker of didactic dirge at every gravesite. Make the stake of licorice, and one can drive it into an endless number of vampire hearts with relative impunity.

But even that choice is no choice; for very soon, the short memory of the reader comes to expect savagery and fulmination. Forgotten are all the palliating equivocations, all the positive comments, all the rave reviews. Only the violence retains the color of passion in a reader's memory. And no matter how deserved the evisceration of the unworthy movie, it becomes suspect. The critic is perceived as just meanspirited; bitterness for the sake of cleverness.

It's not that it's easier to write bad reviews, it's simply that there is so much more bad stuff than good with which the commentator must deal. That wearying truth notwithstanding, the critic is perforce manacled by the rigors of the game, as well as by the insatiable appetites of the readership.

Most people only read film reviews to see if they agree with the commentator, anyhow. And how does one win that pot?

There are smart critics and dopey critics. Pauline Kael and Molly Haskell and most of the time David Denby, in my view, are the models one tries to approach for quality and common sense, for important insights and the placing of a film in its historical context. I suppose Siskel and Ebert are the best of the populist reviewers, though I think the ceaseless demands of cobbling up artificial rancor between them for the delectation of a tv viewership that can be roused from torpor only by brouhaha, has made their duologues cranky and tiring. George Kirgo on CBS was dedicated and wise, but he rapidly grew so disenchanted with what he had to pass judgment on, that when contract renewal time presented itself, he opted out.

Intelligence is not necessarily a condition of employment for being hired as a movie reviewer on the tube. On-camera charisma seems the greater imperative. And what the bosses will accept as "charisma" is often bewildering. Case in point: Carol Buckland, the movie maven on CNN.

So the field is abandoned to fools or hypesters who, if they aren't in the secret pay of studios, sure as hell ought to be. Even hookers resent amateurs giving away the goods without recompense. The Entertainment Tonight mentality is omnipresent: David Sheehan, Gary Franklin, Rex Reed, Michael Medved, Jeffrey Lyons*, Bill Harris (several

of whom I know personally and can attest are mensches) proffer a kind of comment on films that frequently ranges from uselessly bitchy to flat-out wrong. At best, it seems to me, it's plebeian and parataxic. One of the above-named, in fact, sat beside me at a studio sneak preview a couple of years ago, fell snoringly asleep two-thirds of the way through the film—a smarter way to go than those of us who kept slapping ourselves awake for its duration—and appeared on the 11:00 News an hour later . . . and reviewed what he had not seen!

 

* Jeffrey Lyons—who is not only the talented son of the legendary Broadway columnist Leonard Lyons, but is one of the few guys I know privy to the knowledge that, contrary to popular belief, Heinie Manush and Goose Goslin never played ball together, not to mention that he has a better collection of baseball bubble gum cards than I (I lust for his Carl Yastrzemski rookie year card)—is the perfect amalgam of treasures and torments that codify a television personality film reviewer. On the plus side is the inescapable thorn in the paw of reviewers in print mediums: Jeffrey reaches more millions with every review on the tube than does the most widely-read, most widely-syndicated newspaper or magazine critic. (And did you know, as a nasty attempt to alleviate the pain in the paw, that the New York Film Critics Circle denies membership to tv critics?) On the minus side are the parameters of the tv format that truly honk off guys like Lyons: everything must be boiled down to three-minute jingoism and sound-bites; and very little of it can refer to the in-depth erudition or historicity that the good critic needs to buttress an opinion.
Jeffrey Lyons is a man of intelligence, wit, originality of opinion and meticulous honesty. This soundness of credential manages to reveal itself, despite the rigors of the medium in which he presents his views. I envy him his baseball card collection, but not the arena in which he plies his trade.

 

 

But even if every film critic hired to do the job knew, with encyclopedic accuracy, all of the commentary of Agee, Kevin Brownlow, Rotha and Kracauer, we would nonetheless be left with the conundrum of dealing with ignorance on the part of the audience, as well as the almost insurmountable problem of trying to get past the general audience's bastardized taste for the tasteless and bastardized. Neither a small problem.

I mean no offense here. But one deals pragmatically with what one is given. And any concern that this is again a manifestation of my meretriciously Elitist attitude can be evaporated simply by considering the sorts of films doing huge box-office business: Someone to Watch Over Me, Predator, Beverly Hills Cop2, Soul Man, Like Father Like Son. Like the lilies of the field, they toil not, neither do they spin. Or, as Benjamin Franklin said, "An empty bag cannot stand upright."

How, then, does the critic who loves movies convince a readership/viewership sated with Robocop, The Living Daylights and Spaceballs that worthier recipients of its adoration, if given the chance, might be In the Mood and The Princess Bride?

Certainly not by pushing bloated, self-important and phoney "art films" like A Room with a View, no matter how cunningly manipulated commercially to win an Oscar for its scenarist. Such films only give Art a bad name, and further distance the general audience from movies of serious intent that are, for all their struggles to uplift and inform, cracking good stories.

Simple reviews, therefore, seem to me to serve no worthwhile purpose. Without the essay in depth that illuminates the special treasures a specific film proffers, it becomes a niggardly business of popularity contests and hucksterism, intended at its noblest to demonstrate the critic's skill at being coy and arch, while separating the gullible from their hard-earned shekels.

As with most endeavors, those who assay the job at the least demanding level, are the ones who draw down the least calumny, the ones who make the smallest waves, and who go on year after year exacerbating the problem by refusing to challenge their audience. They subscribe to the cheapest rationale given by schlockmeisters for the perpetuation of worn-out templates, the callous disregard for historical or scientific accuracy, the purely mercenary proliferation of haggard sequels, and a widespread anti-intellectual subtext: "We're only giving the audience what it wants."

Well, since this is transparently bullshit—because how can an audience know it wants something not yet created?—even if it were truth as deep and solid as Gene Hackman's talent, as a critic I've tried to say in my essays that just because an audience wants something, it may not necessarily be good for them, and one is not impelled to give it to them if it ain't good for them.

(Don't start that crap of asking, "Well, who the hell are you to judge what's good for people?" We're dealing with common sense here, not the kind of obfuscation the Administration uses to keep Ollie North out of prison. That sort of ad hominem arguing is what keeps us paralyzed. Guns are bad things and ought to be eliminated entirely. Rock cocaine will fuck you up and to hell with how seriously we interfere with the economy of Latin American countries whose ability to repay American bank loans is dependent on the drug crop. Abortion is a matter of individual conscience and piss on those who deflect the arguments with ancient and creaking religious obsession.)

These are reviewers and critics who suck along recommending and tolerating films that are illegible, destructive artistically, transient, manipulative, ubiquitous, and praised by people of confused or no criteria.

Is it not endlessly fascinating how often in this life that plain, unadorned cowardice is deified by the words "prudent behavior"?

Let me give you (in the words of David Denby in New York magazine, 5 October 1987) "an all-too-explicit example of the way giving in to the audience can make a movie worthless:"

 

ALEX FORREST (GLENN CLOSE), THE neurotic New York single woman in Fatal Attraction dresses entirely in white, like Lana Turner's murderous Cora in The Postman Always Rings Twice. Alex works in publishing, and when she meets Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas), a vaguely bored married man who's doing some legal work for her company, she goes after him. They have a drink together, and she's so attentive, she seems to be devouring him whole.

The movie takes her measure cruelly. She has a recognizable kind of New York willfulness, fueled by lonely blues. Her loft, in the meat-packing district, is too bare and white; she pushes too hard, exercises too much. Her initial sweetness—all attention and sympathy—dissolves when Dan returns to his wife at the end of the weekend. The rage she feels has an edge of emotional blackmail to it. She tries to shame him into remaining her lover.

British director Adrian Lyne and screenwriter James Dearden, who spend a fair amount of time setting up Alex as a credible, three-dimensional person, should have continued to take her seriously—they've made her worth it. Her isolated situation is painfully familiar (everyone in professional, upper-middle-class New York knows a stranded Alex). She has a characteristic way of pressing on what Dan says to her, violently holding him to what he's only mentioned in passing. She can't relax, and Glenn Close, who in the past has shown a tendency to darlingness, is scarily effective—sympathetic and dislikable at the same time.

Why does Gallagher get involved with Alex? There's nothing wrong with his marriage. The filmmakers seem to be saying that any married man, given the opportunity, will fool around if he thinks he can get away with it. When Dan tries to disappear after the weekend, Dearden gives Alex something of a case against him. She may have done the pursuing, but, as she says, their power positions aren't the same. She's single, getting older, and what's a weekend diversion for him is a major event for her. Dearden uses feminist perceptions and arguments as a way of creating Alex—and then he gives way to male paranoia and betrays her altogether. She tries to kill herself, and then becomes a vicious, knife-wielding gorgon, stalking Gallagher's wife and daughter. The movie falls to pieces. The last third is despicable—ghoulish horror with blood thrills for the jaded.

I can see the difficulty of working with a character who's never more than partly sympathetic. Where can the story go? The filmmakers' way out is to withdraw all sympathy from the character, which means trashing their own work. The awful thing is that in box-office terms, they aren't wrong. When I saw the picture (on opening day at the Loews Paramount), the audience, cheering on any sign of crazed possessiveness, was obviously longing for Alex to go nuts.

Coming up with a real dramatic resolution might have required more imaginative sympathy, art, and courage than anyone connected with this movie has.

 

Using that much of another writer's work analyzing just one film, as opposed to a pithy sound-bite of my own, all flash and no insight, is excusable only in the context of John Simon's remark, "There is no point in saying less than your predecessors have said."

Denby's example is so perfect, and the observations so smart and so simply stated, that though I thought long and hard of a better exemplar, again and again I returned to what Denby had said. Finally, I decided to hell with it; there are certainly critics sharper than I; and Denby is very likely one of those.

And what he's saying, apart from the obvious that just because an audience wants something doesn't mean you have to give it to them if it corrupts the work and panders to human weakness, cheapness of spirit, and, well, brutishness . . . what he's saying, is that if filmmakers who bask in the glory of the Seriousness of the Cinematic Art wish to continue enjoying the good press they get from the dubs and semiotic simpletons who see grandeur and subcutaneous significance in even the groundling-slanted swill they fob off on us every season, they're going to have to demonstrate a greater sense of responsibility. They can't keep on having it both ways, no matter how glitzily they mount each year's Oscar telecast. What Denby points out so sharply is one of the main themes of this collection of essays, stated a hundred different ways: the accountants and attorneys and fast-shuffle merchants of the film industry have had a free ride for more than half a century. But in putting the buck before the honesty of telling a story truthfully, they have created an illiterate audience whose taste has been systematically corrupted. And at last, as we've seen over the decade of the Eighties, it is a venality that has come back to suck the blood of Hollywood like an AIDS-carrying vampire bat.

The audience is larger than ever, but it's also dumber than ever. Attendance at movie theaters continues to grow by lemming-horde increments: up 7% in 1987 over 1986; according to the U.S. Bureau of Census, as of 1 January 1989, we are more than 250 million strong, and there's a VCR in more than 55% of American homes; theatrical business accounted for 42% of the movie industry's total revenues in 1987, but with 40,000 titles available on videocassette, with more than five hundred new and vintage titles issued monthly, the 39% of the industry's total revenues that is represented by six billion dollars in total video stores' volume tells us the teeter-totter is about to tip, if it hasn't already. And the obvious conclusion we can draw from these statistics plus the evidence of our own experiences?

The audience is getting more illiterate.

(What's that? How does he come to figure such a thing?)

The focus groups and demographic studies all seem to agree: the audience for more difficult films, for subtler and more specialized films, is still extant. But it isn't going to theaters to satisfy its movie hungers. It's staying home, renting the films for enjoyment in convenience, safety and retention of pocket money.

The older filmgoer, the aficionado of foreign and experimental productions, is getting a full menu of movies on cable and through the good offices of the household VCRs. If one wishes to see either the original 1973 French charmer La Bonne Année, starring Lino Ventura and directed by Claude Lelouch, or its equally charming 1987 American remake Happy New Year (with Peter Falk in his finest performance since his 1960 role as Abe "Kid Twist" Reles in Murder, Inc. and the 1962 Dick Powell Theater presentation of Richard Alan Simmons's "The Price of Tomatoes," for which Falk won his first Emmy), one need only visit a well-stocked video outlet or wait a few days for both to appear on HBO. One does not go to the nearest multiplex.

A "little" film like Happy New Year, starring an actor best known to the immature film audience as Columbo—five-finger thespic exercises ever-available in tv syndication or in current blah ABC Mystery Movies—never had a chance in theaters. It sat on the shelf for a year before release, played the big screens for less than a week, and went straight to cable and cassette.

Movie lovers looking for that kind of pleasant, but not box-office-busting, experience stay at home.

So what part of our 250 million made up that 7% increase in theater attendance?

Teenagers, tv zombies brainwashed by thunderbolt commercials saturating primetime, MTV drones who can't get enough Madonna or Prince on the small screen, knife-kill flick devotees, and baby-boom yuppies who have such a total ignorance of even recent history that they do not see how corrupt Mississippi Burning is.

An audience that is, in large measure, cinematically ignorant. That does not resent bad and unnecessary remakes of D.O.A., The Razor's Edge, The Big Clock or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House because for a constituency that renews its cultural amnesia upon awakening every morning, nothing existed before this morning. An audience that, more and more, reads less and less; and thus is insensitive to plot development, the logics of story, complex characterization, or thematic subtext; an audience that judges a film's worth on how spectacular were the special effects.

We don't need stats to bolster the above-stated ugly and Elitist position. Common sense and the evidence of our own observations when we venture out bravely to see a movie more than suffice. (In this collection of essays you will come across more than one recounting of Journeys Among the Trogs and Gargoyles. Compare them to your own experiences, and the case is made, no matter how egalitarian one wishes to be.)

With an audience that has been chivvied and prodded and dulled to a point where the product need never rise above the level of merely competent, however ethically debased, there is no need to overachieve. If you can make millions, fer shur, with another Rambo or Rocky installment, if you can do the dance of the rolling gross by throwing away comedic talents like Whoopi Goldberg, John Candy, Steve Martin or Eddie Murphy in fluff that is as forgettable as a zit, if you can cobble up some clinker based on the current teen rage . . . why bother to risk those millions with a film like Happy New Year or Brazil?

With handmaidens of hype like Entertainment Tonight or People magazine, abetted by Oprah, Geraldo, Letterman, Carson, Arsenio Hall and all the other "talk show" venues that push the devalued product, why buy into the delusions of Art and Creative Responsibility that are based on chance and danger and the likelihood of smearing the bottom line?

Or, to quote another knowledgeable source: "It is not difficult to win the approval of a wide audience when one laughs at the same things, when one is sensitive to the same aspects of life, and moved by the same dramas. This complicity between certain creators and their audience has resulted in successful careers." Francois Truffaut, in the 1984 revised edition of his excellent study, Hitchcock.

When I found that I had drifted into film criticism, almost without knowing it was happening, as purely a sidebar to my other writing, it became clear to me that my impossible mission, if I chose to accept it, was best summed in the words of Samuel Johnson when he wrote:

" . . . illiterate writers will at one time or other, by publick infatuation, rise into renown, who, not knowing the original import of words, will use them with colloquial licentiousness, confound distinction, and forget propriety.

"But if the changes that we fear be thus irresistable . . . it remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure."

Now you know how I first went wrong and came to be one who cannot help but go against the flow, how that twisted view of the universe formed the philosophy of film criticism I've detailed here, and all that remains is to recount how I slid into writing about the art of cinema because of the basest motives in the history of movie reviewers. Complete with another long footnote.

 

I'll try to make this fast.

It was 1963. I'd arrived in Los Angeles on New Year's Day the year before, limping into the city in a battered Ford, with a number of encumbrances about which I've written elsewhere (see the introduction to my 1962 collection Ellison Wonderland if you cannot contain your morbid curiosity).

This is the truth, no hyperbole: I had exactly ten cents in my pocket.

The first year trying to break into filmwriting, even with substantial credits as a published author, was murder. I was always broke, had to write constantly, had to write some stuff that burst into flame and was reduced to ash eleven minutes after it was published, even found myself writing for Confidential, just to pay the $135 a month rent for the little treehouse on Bushrod Lane.

In those halcyon days of television, five months before the September "new season" would premiere, each show would have a "cattle call" for freelance writers.

Most series these days are written by a group of writers who are "on staff." They have such crazed titles as Story Consultant or Executive Creative Associate or simply Story Editor, but for the most part they just write the segments using the m.o. of a staff brainstorming session that cobbles up the story line by committee, and then the individual episodes are parceled out. The producers insist they get a greater uniformity in the work by this method . . . and I wouldn't doubt it.

But there is very little freelance work left for the more than seven thousand members of the Writers Guild who, in former times, could get an entire year's worth of work in just three months of hustling. The shows used a wide variety of writers, not just the favorites they knew could meet their demands. And they found these other writers through use of the then-hated "cattle call."

Today, the staff personnel spend as much of their time in the pits, rewriting the scripts of the few freelancers who—because of terms in the Writers Guild contract, the Minimum Basic Agreement—must be assigned a certain number of the available script assignments.

As with any labor arrangement, there are positive and negative aspects to the current system, as there were with the routine in use in the '60s. More writers worked in those days, but the quality of the writing was frequently entry-level, because each writer would overcommit—the rest of the year was always catch-what-you-can—so they wrote as fast as they could, dashing from one cattle call to another. The word would go out to agents all over town, and special screenings of the pilot episode would be shown at one of the studio's little viewing rooms where producers looked at the previous days' shooting, what used to be called "the rushes," what were known in 1963 as "the dailies." These cattle calls ran in shifts, sometimes for as long as a week, with anywhere from ten to thirty writers at a time. Then would begin the feeding frenzy. Every writer would scramble from cattle call to cattle call, dreaming up ideas as quickly as possible, getting as many assignments of the available slots committed by the network as possible.

In the Sixties, the networks gave orders for a lot more segments than these days. If you get a firm thirteen these days, you're considered a favorite of the Gods in the Tower. But in the Sixties it was matter-of-course for, say, NBC to give every show an order for 28, 30, 32, 35 segments (which meant that each show put into work between forty and fifty scripts, knowing some would fall out or prove otherwise unshootable).

I got a call from Marty Shapiro in the early spring (or possibly Stu Robinson in those days, before Marty opened his own shop with Mark Lichtman, and was still with General Artists Corporation, now long defunct). Cattle call for a new show over at Four Star, being produced by Aaron Spelling. Spinoff from a popular segment of The Dick Powell Theater, starring Gene Barry as a millionaire police detective named Amos Burke. Go over and see the pilot on Thursday. I asked how many writers had been invited. Marty said it was an open call. So how many do you think? Maybe two or three hundred. How many slots open? They've already assigned a few to people who've worked for Spelling on other shows. So how many still open?

Maybe ten.

Great, I thought.

So I went to the cattle call, and saw the pilot. Cute show. I knew I could write it. But, in truth, I'd arrived the year before and had only done two shows—an adaptation of my book Memos From Purgatory for the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and a half-hour syndicated script for Ripcord. I'd bombed out on everything else, and was really hustling. My credits were nominal, and my name was unknown. So I had to use cunning and duplicity.

The modus operandi for these cattle calls, the Proper Way to Come On, was to wait till the screening ended, make all the pattycake remarks about how great it is and how it'll run for six years, and then have your agent call the next day for an appointment with the story editor, to whom you'd "pitch" an idea.

As the lights came up, I spotted the guy who was doing the line producing for Spelling, a tall and distinguished, actually kindly-looking man, named Richard Newton. He had been a friend of Spelling's for years, all the way back to Texas, when Aaron and the late Carolyn Jones (who became Spelling's first wife) were all in college together. As everyone was shuffling in the seats, adjusting their eyes, Newton stepped to the front of the screening room and made a brief explanation about how the show would work: each segment would be titled "Who Killed—" followed by the name of the victim, as in "Who Killed Beau Sparrow?" or "Who Killed Avery Lord?" Each show would have half a dozen or more big name stars in cameo roles, to be shot all in one day. Each show would be sprightly, smart, urbane and filled with as many beautiful women as the scenarist could even semi-logically work into the plot. Oh, yeah, this was my kinda show.

Richard Newton concluded his remarks and asked, in a way intended to be polite but not actually to encourage any real time-waste at that preliminary stage, "Are there any questions?"

To which query I raised my hand.

Newton warily nodded at me, and I said, "How about I kill Hugh Hefner for you? Did the cartoonist do it because his career had been stymied? Did the centerfold of the month do it because she'd had his illegitimate child? Or was it the swami, the blind hunchback they find sleeping in the press room, or the venal publisher's own mother?"

Newton grinned at me and said, "Come on over to the office for a talk."

I'd beaten out three hundred other writers, and went to work on Burke's Law. It was my breakthrough, and Richard Newton (who can be seen these days as the judge in the Matlock series) took me under his wing. We remain friends to this day and he was one of the few producers for whom I would work for nothing; writing for Richard was always fun and artistically rewarding.

And that was because he was aware, right from the start, that he was dealing with a loonie.

My first script, "Who Killed Alex Debbs?"—the murder of a publisher of men's magazines—was written almost in secret, kept from Aaron Spelling by Richard till it was finished. Richard and I worked together, writer and producer, like the Corsican Brothers, telepathic twins who understood each other and trusted each other implicitly, without having to talk about it. But Spelling, who found my way of working peculiar from that of the other writers whom he'd hired, kept asking Richard, "What's with this new kid, this Ellison? What's he up to?" And Richard would fend him off, saying, "Don't worry about it. I'm taking care of it. He's a terrific writer, just be patient, you'll see."

And, because working with Richard Newton was a situation of trust and freedom, Aaron did see. "Who Killed Alex Debbs?" knocked his socks off to the extent that when it aired, Aaron threw one of those legendary Hollywood parties for its premiere. His enormous home in Beverly Hills was fitted out with a big tv set in every downstairs room, and he invited three hundred celebrities to see this first script by the kid he had "discovered."

At that party Sandy Koufax and Sammy Davis, Jr. and Ann-Margret and Vincent Price and John Huston treated me as if I were one of their inner circle. I wasn't, of course; it was just a moment in my life when my path crossed theirs; but to one who was still incredibly naive about Hollywood Life, despite having run away from home at thirteen and having grown up on the road, despite having been married and divorced twice, despite having served two years in the Army . . . it was heart-stopping and dazzling.

"Who Killed Alex Debbs?" featured cameo performances by John Ireland, Suzy Parker, Burgess Meredith, Arlene Dahl, Diana Dors, Jan Sterling and Sammy Davis, Jr. and it aired on a Friday night over ABC, October 25th, 1963.I watched in amazement as my work went out to all of America, and as the Great and the Near-Great and Those Who Hoped They Would Become Great praised me and shook my hand and told me I had a bright future in show biz. The following Sunday, the New York Times, reviewing the show, called it "a blissful melding of Noel Coward drawing-room drollery with Agatha Christie suspense." (Or words very similar. It's been twenty-six years, and though the clipping is in a scrapbook somewhere around here, I'll be damned if I'll spend a week hunting it down. But if I've misquoted, it's only a little, from dimmed memory. That's what the Times said, more of more than less. You can either trust me on this one, or go microfiche.)

And Aaron Spelling decided I was to be the fair-haired boy. I descended, intensely but thankgoodness only briefly, into what I now refer to mordantly as my days of "going Hollywood." During that period I wrote for, and got to spend time with, genuine legends: Gloria Swanson, Charlie Ruggles, Buster Keaton, Wally Cox, Joan Blondell, Aldo Ray, Mickey Rooney, Rod Steiger and even Nina Foch. I went to Hollywood parties, I dined with celebrities and multimillionaires, I became involved with starlets, I went more than a little crazy. Even wound up married and divorced a third time, all in forty-five days. But that's another story.

Yet it was during that period that I began writing film criticism, and (even as evil can come from good, good can come from evil) it was as a direct result of falling under Spelling's enchantment for the better part of a year.*

 

*Strictly speaking, the assertion that I wrote no film comment prior to 1965 is untrue. Like everyone else, I had opinions on movies from the moment I left the Utopia Theater in Painesville, Ohio, on that Saturday afternoon when I first saw Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in re-release in 1940. (That same afternoon, I saw Victor Jory in the first chapter of The Shadow serial.) And so, as it was with many of you, I wrote "movie reviews" for my high school newspaper and, not much later, "reviews of things seen and heard" for my fanzine Dimensions. Upon completion of the introduction to this book, it was pointed out to me by the indefatigable Gil Lamont, as editorial and copyediting amanuensis (and one strangely more familiar with my more obscure writings than even I), that I was leading astray the readers by suggesting that I had sprung full-blown as a film critic. That I was dissembling when I ignored the first sophomoric cinema scrawlings. Mr. Lamont reminded me that the demon bibliographer Leslie Kay Swigart had actually gone to Cleveland a number of years ago and, somehow, had managed to exhume copies of the East High Blue and Gold. He suggested that a sample of my pre-professional film comment ought to be included here, if for no other reason than to let a little air out of my sails. If you turn to Appendix A you will find republished for the first time, a brief insight by the then-seventeen-year-old Ellison dated 26 September 1951. In the spirit of mental health and a determination to hold onto whatever vestiges of credential are left to me after bowing to Mr. Lamont's chivvying, I have not included any other examples of post-zit journalism.

 

 

This wasn't as fast to tell as I'd thought. Anyway, what happened was this:

One day I was in the Burke's Law office, it's now 1965, and Aaron came in as we were trying to cast Betty Hutton for my script "Who Killed 1/2 of Glory Lee?" He was bubbling with excitement about the fabulous night he had spent the day before, at a "very exclusive new club" called The Daisy. He went on rapturously, explaining at length that this club was so exclusive that even if you had the Big Bucks for membership, you couldn't get in unless you Were Somebody. Well, I listened raptly (Richard listened with weariness and the boredom of familiarity). And after Aaron had strutted and fulminated about this den of grandeur whose portals were verboten to all but the denizens of the mountaintop, I said, "Hell, I could get in."

Aaron looked at me with a condescending smile. "Forget it, Harlan. They only take in members who are famous."

"I can get a membership."

"No chance."

"Wanna bet?"

"Bet what?"

I smiled that self-assured smartass smile that goes before a long fall from a great height, and I said, "I'll bet you a grand against a thousand dollars off my next script assignment, that I can not only become a member of The Daisy, but I can get in within twenty-four hours from right now."

Aaron searched around in his briefcase for his wallet, pulled out a plastic card and held it up. It was a membership card for the Daisy. "For a thousand, you'll have one of these, with your name on it, and actually be a member of The Daisy by . . . " he consulted his wristwatch, " . . . eleven o'clock tomorrow?"

I nodded, suddenly getting a little frightened. A thousand in 1963 was a lot of money. It may only be a loaf of bread and a jar of Vlasic pickles these days, but as a one-hour story and teleplay brought a writer top-of-the-show remuneration at $4500, that thousand dollars suddenly loomed very large.

"You're on," Aaron said, smugly. He made like a Great White and everyone else in the office (except Richard Newton) grinned back, prepared to see the smartass get his comeuppance.

When the meeting broke up, and I was on my way back to the tiny office where they kept me soldered to the typewriter, Richard overtook me and laid a big-brotherly hand on my shoulder. "At times," he said, with affection and concern, "I see you as a very foolish man who doesn't know when he's dancing at the lip of the abyss." I don't think I'll ever forget that moment: it may have been for me—at age 31—that I began belatedly to reach puberty. I might have tried to explain to him that I couldn't help myself, that I had been warped by Hoppity, but it wouldn't have made any more sense in 1965 than it does now.

Nonetheless, I was determined to pull it off.

In just such a foolhardy state of arrogance and braggadocio did Marie Antoinette say, "Let them eat cake!" and did Gary Hart challenge the newshounds to follow him and watch his every move.

Once back in my office, I began attacking the problem in just the way Sherlock Holmes would have gone at it. Logically. Quietly. Rationally.

Hysterically.

I started calling friends who were "in the know." I asked them to tell me everything they knew about The Daisy, and who ran it. The name that came up was Jack Martin Hanson, who owned the posh and trendy clothing shop in Beverly Hills known as Jax.

Nothing there.

I kept probing, and one of my contacts said he'd heard that Hanson had just taken over Cinema magazine from a guy named James Silke, that the magazine was intended as something of a high-profile purchase for Hanson, a way to gain greater access to the film community and the people who had enough money to buy the clothes his shop sold, not to mention the kind of money needed to afford membership in his restricted Daisy.

Bingo.

I tracked down the number of Cinema's offices, and managed late that afternoon to speak to a young man named Curtis Lee Hanson. It did not escape my notice that Curtis Lee and Jack Martin had the same last name, Hanson. It turned out that Curtis Lee (now a successful and very talented writer/director, whose most recent feature was the thriller The Bedroom Window) was Jack's nephew, and he had just taken over as editor, Silke having departed to commence what eventually became an undistinguished filmwriting career.

Hanson was vaguely aware of my name, had read something of mine somewhere, so he was friendly and receptive to my writing for his magazine. It was a snazzy slick journal, filled with photos, and with a somewhat loftier view of film than most of the gossipy, ephemeral magazines of the period. I said my fee for such writing was high, but that I'd make an exception in the case of Cinema, on one condition. (Curtis Lee heaved a sigh of relief; the magazine was paying almost nothing; it was a matter of prestige and like that.) He asked the condition, and I said, "I want a full, free membership in The Daisy. And I have to have the card in my hand no later than nine AM tomorrow morning."

He said he didn't know if that could be done, that his connection with The Daisy was almost non-existent, that his uncle tried to keep the operations separate. I said it was non-negotiable, that it was the deal-breaker. Curtis Lee asked if I had something written already that he could show to Jack Hanson, to convince him that a magazine already publishing Bogdanovich, Dalton Trumbo and Terry Southern needed a Harlan Ellison.

I said, "Well, I've just written a review-critique of The Train, the Frankenheimer film that'll be opening in about three weeks. Would that do?"

He said yes, I said I'd have it messengered over to him, he said great, said he'd read it, said if it seemed up to their standards and needs he'd run it over to Jack and have him read it, said if Jack went for it he'd push for a Daisy card for me. I said thanks, hung up, and turned to my typewriter.

I wrote that review-critique in about forty minutes. You will find it in this book.

At eight o'clock that night, having sent the review to Curtis Lee by messenger from Four Star around one-thirty that afternoon, I got a phone call at my tiny treehouse home. It was Curtis Lee. "You want me to bring your membership card around, or do you want to pick it up?"

I drove out, met Hanson for the first time in Beverly Hills, and took possession of Daisy membership card number 49. I also accepted an assignment to do a short piece on Edward G. Robinson as he neared his seventy-second birthday.

Both pieces, and two more, appeared in the July-August 1965 issue of Cinema. I was a film critic.

The next day, sitting in Aaron's office with Richard and casting director Betty Martin and three or four others, Aaron came rushing in, tossed the stack of scripts he'd read the night before on his desk and, without preamble, turned to me.

"Well?"

I looked innocent. I can do that. "Well what?"

"You owe me a thousand dollars," he said, Great Whitelike.

Everyone in the room looked nervous. It had been a good gag the day before, but they knew I couldn't possibly have pulled it off, and they now knew that Aaron would certainly call the business people and tell them that Ellison's next assignment was for a thousand less. Richard Newton didn't look happy with me.

"Well, uh, no," I said slowly, forking two ringers into my shirt pocket. "You owe me a thousand." I brought out The Daisy membership card. High Noon. The Guns of Navarone.

Go ahead, picture the scene in your mind. This is a book about movies, so run it through your head. It's good exercise.

 

I've written elsewhere, and at length, about my brief crazy time of having Gone Hollywood. Much of that lunacy centered around The Daisy.

 

*In the September 1966 issue of Los Angeles magazine, appeared a 5200 word article titled "Nightmare Nights at The Daisy." I wrote that article. Apart from a minor reprinting in a men's magazine exactly one year later, that piece has never been collected in one of my books of essays. It forms an interesting Hollywood footnote to this introduction. If you turn to Appendix B (page 423) you will find it as it was written at that moment in my life when I came to my senses and foreswore involvement with the social scene in the movie colony. Upon rereading, I find it verbose, purple, overstated and wincingly melodramatic. But in its way, I guess, it is historical document at its silliest. Like the view of a former Flat-Earther after having taken his first space-ride.

 

 

But if it had not been for the cattle call, for Richard Newton, for my awakening awareness that I did not want to grow up to be Aaron Spelling and needed to one-up the Great Man; had it not been for having been twisted and bent by Hoppity and the need to assert the know-it-all in me who now writes pontificating film criticism; had it not been for Curtis Lee Hanson, my friend and one-time editor, and Cinema magazine, now long-gone but fondly remembered; had it not been for that odd congeries of circumstances, this book of more than twenty-five years' worth of film comment would not exist.

Having thus explained how I was corrupted, warped, driven to this unseemly stretch of writing, I know that those among you who paused in hammering together the gibbet to listen to this interminable screed, will now understand that I am innocent, that never has a cruel thought passed through my head, and that if justice is to be visited on anyone, it should properly fall on the ghosts of Max and Dave Fleischer and my Grandmother, on Aaron Spelling and Richard Newton, and certainly on Curtis Lee Hanson, all of whom ruined that sweet little Ellison kid.

For myself, I've never cried, "Fire!" in a crowded theater.