INSTALLMENT 31:
In Which The LI'l White Lies Thesis (Part Three) Approaches A Nascent State, Approaches The Dreadful Door, And En Route Questions Meat Idolatry

Being lied to. Selling inferior goods by duping us with assertions that said grubby goods have "phantom values" apart from what we see on the screen: The Emerald Forest supposedly based on a true story; Ladyhawke a retelling of medieval legends; Hangar 18 revealing suppressed Air Force knowledge of UFOs; lies, everyone of them. Lures, cynically dangled.

Being lied to. Promoting films of rape, violence, ethical debasement, moral turpitude, inhuman behavior, sexism with prolonged graphic representations in adoring closeup, and then justifying it by wide-eyed explanation that "we show you this woman having an icepick driven into her eye to show you how much we disapprove of it." Exploitation, pandering to the debased nature of the contemporary audience, feeding the sickness. Rationalizing and justifying and excusing . . . with lies.

Being lied to. Using the ignorance of the audience against itself. Telling us that by coloring stylish black-and-white films like Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, they offer them to a generation of young viewers who won't go to a movie if it isn't in color. Denying to that generation the experience of seeing such objets d'art as they were intended to be seen. Producing by such corruption of the audience a self-fulfilling prophecy, by which the ignorant are kept ignorant . . . in the sense of uneducated.

Being lied to. As we examined such misrepresentation last time, through the noxious practice of plagiarism. Parvenus and no-talents, rampant in the film industry, incapable of creating new dreams themselves, hungering for sinecures as directors and producers while condemning writers to the beanfield labor of actually doing the screenplay and then having it wrested from them so they can "reinterpret." Unabashedly stealing ideas and concepts and entire screenplays, recasting them in their own cliché-riddled manner, and sending them out to market, to an audience with either short memories or no memories. If you have seen the Clint Eastwood film Pale Rider and are not deeply infuriated at it . . . then you are the ignorant of whom I speak. And if you look bewildered at that: remark, and your attitude turns rancid against he who points out that you are cerebrose in this matter, then I suggest you go and rent videocassettes of that film and Shane. And if you do not perceive very quickly that Pale Rider is a shameless, awful ripoff of the A.B. Guthrie-Jack Sher adaptation of Jack Schaefer's exquisite novel (combined with a ripoff of the "ghost" element from the 1972 Eastwood vehicle High Plains Drifter, written by Ernest Tidyman), then you are dumber than I think. And you deserve no better than rudeness, because your ignorance only permits this evil to flourish.

So let us consider two recent films that mayor may not be ripoffs of famous science fiction stories. Two films that did extremely well at the box office, and have been lauded as fresh and original ideas by critics utterly unaware of the vast body of sf material that has been fueling the engines of film thieves for fifty years. Two films that take the basic ideas already existent in sf stories, simplify them, render them in much cruder form, and deny to the original authors the ability ever to have their work translated to the screen.

The first is The Running Man (Taft Entertainment/Keith Barish Productions) and the second is The Hidden (New Line Cinema).

In the Los Angeles Daily News of 13 November 87, a gentleman named Michael Healy, who is identified as "Daily News Film Critic," says this of The Running Man:

"Schwarzenegger stumbles and falls flat in this futuristic satire on TV game shows with a plot lifted from Richard Connell's story 'The Most Dangerous Game.' Stephen King did the lifting under the name Richard Bachman, and Steven de Souza turned it all into a screenplay about as original as a speech by Joe Biden."

Close. Very close. And one must admire Mr. Healy for not only getting full writing credits into the first three paragraphs of his review—as opposed to most "film critics" who find it less of a strain on their limited intelligence to use the odious crush word "sci-fi" than to describe an individual film as what it is, without recourse to a demeaning neologism . . . and who ease that strain on their gray tapioca matter even more by pretending the director wrote the film, with never a scenarist credit to be found passim the review, much less a reference to the original source material—but Healy draws our applause for additionally noting the historical precedent for the plot. A film critic who not only reads (New Miracles! New Miracles!) but who has a sense of literary ebb and flow. And he's close, very close.

Yes, the famous 1924 Connell short story (oft-refilmed) is certainly the master template for The Running Man, but it isn't the specific work pilfered. We come to Steven de Souza's ankyloglossial screenplay by way of the 1982 NAL paperback novel pseudonymously penned by Stephen King. And we come to Bachman's The Running Man by way of Robert Sheckley's famous short story "The Prize of Peril" (The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, May 1958). If you don't remember the yarn, go find it in Sheck's collections Store of Infinity, The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley, or anyone of several dozen anthologies in which it has been reprinted. It's about this guy who becomes an unwilling contestant on a nationally-obsessive tv program where you run and run and people try to kill you.

It was the story that sparked the campus fad some years back, for hunter/victim games in which students stalked each other and "killed" each other with paint-squibs from toy guns. Which fad, in turn, sparked a dreadful movie titled Gotcha!

When the Bachman book first appeared, it drew almost no attention, because no one knew it was Stephen behind the nom-de-plume. But when it came out, and prices for those four NAL throwaway adventure novels by "Bachman" went through the roof in antiquarian bookdealer catalogues that provide Colombian Gold-level fixes for King addicts, and NAL reissued the books in an omnibus volume, I received a call from Sheckley.

"Have you read The Running Man?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"Listen: I may be crazy," Sheck said, with considerable nervousness and more than a scintilla of reluctance to rush to judgment, "but do you see a lot of my story 'The Prize of Peril' in that book?"

I said, "Yes, I see it as being damned nearly the same plot, done at length."

A silence passed between us. A long silence, in which each of us tried to find a way to speak the unspeakable, to approach that dreadful door behind which lay the necessity to think the unthinkable. Finally, Bob said:

"Well, what do you think?"

And I said, very carefully, "I know Steve, and I know damned well he wouldn't steal. It's that simple. But Stephen has often said that he's been inspired by films and stories he's read years before, that slipped down into the back of his head. This might be one of those cases."

Again a silence. And at last Sheckley asked, very hesitantly,

"Do you think I should do something about this?"

"I think you ought to talk to Stephen."

What lay in the subtext of our conversation was the dire possibility that something would have to be done. As one who has been compelled to pursue legal means to redress the sins of plagiarism committed against me by film companies and TV networks, I was careful not to put Sheckley in a state of paranoia about The Running Man. But talking to Stephen King seemed the correct way to go about it. Sheckley asked me if I'd call Steve and give him Bob's number, and ask if he'd call.

I said I would; I called Steve and we talked; and he said he remembered reading "The Prize of Peril" years and years before; and he assured me he'd call Sheckley to work it out.

That call transpired, and Sheckley later told me he was satisfied with King's open remarks. The sense I got from what Sheck said, was that Steve may well have dredged out of the mire of memory the basic plotline of "Prize of Peril," never remembering it as an actual reading experience but transforming it, as all writers do, into the self-generated conceit that was published as The Running Man.

The aphorist Olin Miller has said, "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory."

For those who have read Stephen King's The Tommyknockers and continue to endure the frisson of déjà vu, I suggest you rent the videocassette of Five Million Years to Earth (1968). And when you compare them, understand that I do not in even the tiniest way suggest that Stephen King cops the work of other writers. Let me say that again, even stronger, so no one of even the most diminished capacity can read into my words the ugly intimation: Stephen King does not steal. He's too good to have to steal. But in the realm of sf/fantasy there are ideas that we rework and re-rework, recast and refashion, expand and transmogrify, that become common coin. James Blish was not the first writer to use the "enclosed universe" concept, but who would deny his reinterpretation of Bob Heinlein's "Universe" as the extraordinary "Surface Tension"? And if Heinlein was sparked to write The Puppet Masters after being enthralled by Wells's War of the Worlds, is there anyone idiot enough to suggest it was plagiarism?

No, literary crossover happens. And we are all enriched by it.

But "The Prize of Peril" is a richer way of telling the story at hand than The Running Man, especially as debased by Steven de Souza and Schwarzenegger. The lie we are fed, is the lie that The Running Man is a fresh, bold, new idea.

And if we look at The Hidden, from a screenplay by Robert Hunt, we can see the basic plot core of Hal Clement's famous novel of interplanetary cops-and-robbers, Needle. And we can see The Hidden ripped off for television as NBC's Something Is Out There, the pilot of which aired recently, with the promise that if there is a Fall Season, we'll be getting Hal Clement's Needle as a series written and produced by people who think Something Is Out There is only first-generation theft, when it all proceeds from Clement . . . who won't see a cent of the millions these arrivistes will rake in.

The lie we are told is that these watered-down, scientifically illiterate, mook-level ripoffs are the Real Thing. And that is why, in installment 30 ½ of this column, I urged the Science Fiction Writers of America to reinstate the Dramatic Writing category in the Nebula awards. If sf writers don't move to quash the lie, then who will? And if the readers and writers in the genre don't come to their senses and stop accepting this institutionalized theft, on which the lie floats blissfully, then those of you who praise dreck like The Running Man deserve no better than you get. Behind that dreadful door through which you, as innocent moviegoers, pass to nullify your reason with special effects and the idolatry of Schwarzeneggers and Stallones and Michael J. Foxes, lies the awful truth that the treasurehouse of ideas sf has filled since (at least) 1926, is being systematically looted by people who sneer at the concept of primacy of ownership of the creators.

As coda to this essay, and to satisfy Brian Siano of Philadelphia, and the others who requested it, let me make my feelings known about Arnold Schwarzenegger, et al.

Somewhere in the commercially ongoing practice of (how shall I put this delicately) "Idolizing Meat" there is a nubbin of rationale that has always escaped me.

Idolizing Meat may have been started in 1917 when the silent film actor Otto Elmo Linkenhelter was retitled Elmo Lincoln, and cast as the first incarnation of Burroughs's lord of the jungle in Tarzan of the Apes . . . but there are very likely a dozen even earlier isometric idols that cine-historians can point out.

But thereafter, fer shoor, the film industry mentality has gifted us with one muscle bound matinee idol after another, from Victor Mature and Steve Reeves to the current batch of melon-smugglers—a curl of Cro-Magnons, perhaps?—whose thespic abilities seem to me best subsumed in the quote from Dorothy Parker, or Alexander Wollcott, or somebody swell like that, who commented that a certain actress had flung her talent the full range from A to B.

I speak now of the cinematic lineal descendants of Johnny Weismuller, Buster Crabbe, and Gordon Scott: the vacuous Miles O'Keeffe, the anthracitelike Dolph Lundgren, the spectacularly untalented Sam J. Jones, to whom human speech does not appear to be a natural tongue, and those rara avae, Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger (were there ever two more perfect names for such as these?), who have transcended species, perhaps even phylum.

If one cannot fathom the mythic pull of the tongue-tied, lumbering beefcake as exemplified by Mature or Lundgren (and dontcha just know that in their heart of hearts they all want to assay the role of Hamlet), there is at least an inkling of what it is that draws us to the last of this parade of Idolized Meat.

Stallone first captured our respect and affection by turning his life into an American success story worthy of Horatio Alger, and then gave us a genuine sternum punch of an object-lesson in our own schizoid national character by JekyllHydeing into a Rocky/Rambo gaucherie of arrogance, insolence, brutality, and crippled expectations.

Schwarzenegger departs from the enigma of beefcake through the exeunt left of having demonstrated a cynical sense of humor about himself, about "the business," and about the archetypes he is supposed to represent. The superman, the unstoppable engine, the noble savage. Any man who can make a joke on himself about how much more gracefully the stop-motion robot in Terminator moves than he does, is a man whose career as an actor might well outdistance mere testosterone.

But as Michael Healy points out in the review I quoted earlier, the sneaky pleasure we derived from watching Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron and Terminator is absent from humorless, jaundiced slaughterfests like Commando, Raw Deal, Predator and, most particularly, The Running Man.

This film is the latest in a demonstration of how paucive intelligences will loot the treasurehouse. It knows nothing of the logic of science fiction. Nothing of the internal tensions that make sf work on the screen, à la Blade Runner. Nothing of extrapolation along sensible lines. This is one of those utterly unworkable "future societies" that makes no sense, save in the rathole rationalizations of know-nothings and studio heads. There is no characterization—which in a film that stars Schwarzenegger is a knife through the gut—not even for an actor as compelling as Yaphet Kotto. They are set-ups, to be gunned down for the predilection of thug audiences for whom the judgment scale of quality is measured in liters of blood and spilled entrails.

And so Schwarzenegger's Ben Richards becomes, in the clubby hands of Steven E, de Souza and director Paul Michael Glaser (who I can never remember which he was, Starsky or Hutch), nothing but a chunk of Idolized Meat with bad puns grafted on.

If this film has any claim to posterity, it will be due to the spectacular performance of Richard Dawson as Damon Killian, the tv game show host. It is a performance so dazzling that one can assume Dickie Dawson wasn't this year's Oscar winner for Best Male Supporting because of the redolent nature of the film itself.

And the crusher that denied Dawson his moment of international acclaim is the same crusher that flattens us, as aficionados of the literature of imagination. The crusher is the Little White Lie that steals from the treasurehouse and dulls the patina of the artifact, and substitutes Idolized Meat for the rapture of the sense of wonder. And gets you to pay for, and then praise indiscriminately, the devalued product.

Can it be that you have been reduced to the lowest idiot expectancy because of the untutored nature of the Illiterate Audience?

Well, let me leave you with the words of Stephen King, who has often said the best a writer can hope for, from Hollywood is when "they buy the rights, pay you half a million dollars, for some reason never make the movie—but you get to keep the half million without the embarrassment of some awful film coming out."

Which is a whole helluva lot sweeter than no one knowing Sheckley or Clement were there first, and ain't gonna see a kopeck for the error of cleverness and early arrival.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction / September 1988