Harlan Ellison's Watching (58 page)

Walter's anger was instant. "Don't break your back straining yourself!" I fumfuh'd, not understanding why he was so hot, and only made matters worse (apparently) by saying, "Come on, Walter, I'm not bullshitting you. It was fine. I mean, they don't really give you Gielgud or Olivier material to play . . . what you were given you did very well, indeed." Which only raised his ire the more. And he snapped my head off that he was through discussing it, and I said we can talk about it more later, if you like, and Walter snarled, "Yeah, sure," or bit-off words to that effect, and he hung up on me; and we haven't talked since, which is a while ago; and I don't like having Walter pissed at me, but there's not much I can do about it this time till he cools down and chooses to honor my honestly-delivered remarks.

Which would be, taken at face value, merely the recounting of an unfortunate misunderstanding between long-time chums, were it not that (upon reflection born of gloom) what I said to Walter emerges from a response to the totality of the
Star Trek
phenomenon. Which is, at last, the proper fodder for this column.

It is no secret that for many years I was not exactly the biggest booster of
ST
. Having been in at the beginning
before
the beginning of the series, having been one of the first writers hired to write the show, I was wildly enthusiastic about the series as Gene Roddenberry had initially conceived it. (In fact, at the very first Nebula Awards banquet of the Science Fiction Writers of America, which I set up at the Tail O' The Cock here in Los Angeles, I arranged for a pre-debut screening of the pilot segment.) The show debuted on September 8th, 1966 and by December it was in trouble with NBC. The Nielsens were very low, and Gene asked me if there was anything I could do to get the popularity the show was experiencing in science fiction circles conveyed to the network. I set up "The Committee" and using the facilities of Desilu Studios, I sent out five thousand letters of appeal to fandom, urging the viewers to inundate NBC with demands that the show be kept on the air. (The original of that letter, seen here for the first time in print, is reproduced as a sidebar courtesy of The Noble Ferman Editors.)

And so it was with heavy heart that I fell away, as it were. I had my thorny problems with Gene over "The City on the Edge of Forever," about which I've written elsewhere; and after my segment aired I divorced myself from
ST
with a passion that frequently slopped over into meanspiritedness. When the first film came out in 1979, I wrote a long and bruising review that resulted in fannish animus up to and well past the egging of my home. This, despite the fact that by now everyone agrees
Star Trek—The Motion Picture
was a dismal piece of business.

I was not much more impressed with
ST
as the subject for full-length features when
ST II
was released in 1982, chiefly because Paramount thought it could amortize some of the sets and recoup their losses on the first flick. Or if not losses, at least make a few bucks on the residue.

The Search for Spock
in 1984 seemed to me a decent piece of work, and I said so in print. But by that time
ST
had already been an animated cartoon series, and the original shows were a vast moneymaking machine for Paramount in syndication. Not to mention videocassettes, which sold steadily and well.

Now comes the fourth feature-length outing of the crew of the NCC-1701, and it is far and away the best of the bunch, a film that capitalizes on what the series did best when it was at the peak of its limited form. It is a film about the crew, who have become family for millions of people around the world, and it is filled with humanity, with caring, and with simple, uncomplicated elements of decency and responsibility. It eschews almost all of the jiggery-pokery of abstruse theology, gimcrack hardware, imbecile space battles and embarrassingly sophomoric "message" philosophy to present an uncomplicated story of the clock ticking down to doom while decent people struggle to find a timely and humane solution.

THE COMMITTEE

Foul Anderson • Robert Bloch • Lester del Rey • Harlan Ellison Philip Jose Farmer • Frank Herbert • Richard Matheson Theodore Sturgeon • A. E. Van Vogt

Dear __________,

It's finally happened. You've been in the know for a long time, you've known the worth of mature science fiction, and you've squirmed at the adolescent manner with which it has generally been presented on television. Now, finally, we've lucked-out, we've gotten a show on prime time that is attempting to do the missionary job for the field of speculative fiction. The show is STAR TREK, of course, and its aims have been lofty. STAR TREK has been carrying the good word out to the boondocks. Those who have seen the show know it is frequently written by authentic science fiction writers, it is made with enormous difficulty and with considerable pride. If you were at the World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland you know it received standing ovations and was awarded a special citation by the Convention. STAR TREK has finally showed the mass audience that science fiction need not be situation comedy in space suits. The reason for this letter—and frankly, its appeal for help—is that we've learned this show, despite its healthy growth, could face trouble soon. The Nielsen Roulette game is being played. They say, "If mature science fiction is so hot, howzacome that kiddie space show on the other network is doing so much better?" There is no sense explaining it's the second year for the competition and the first year for STAR TREK; all they understand are the decimal places. And the sound of voices raised. Which is where you come in.

STAR TREK's cancellation or a change to a less adult format would be tragic, seeming to demonstrate that real science fiction cannot attract a mass audience.

We need letters! Yours and ours, plus every science fiction fan and TV viewer we can reach through our publications and personal contacts.
Important: Not form letters, not using our phrases here
; They should be the fan's own words and honest attitudes. They should go to: (a) local television stations which carry STAR TREK; (b) to sponsors who advertise on STAR TREK; (c) local and syndicated television columnists; and (d) TV GUIDE and other television magazines.

The situation is critical; it has to happen
now
or it will be too late. We're giving it all our efforts; we hope we can count on yours.

Sincerely,
Harlan Ellison Committee
December 1,1966
 

While I have my Writers Guild of America member reservations about the propriety of a solo credit that reads A LEONARD NIMOY FILM for the man's second directorial outing, and while I still see the hideous thumbprint of Bill Shatner's demand for more and more domination of scene after scene, I recommend this film to those few of you who may have missed it. It is a
good
movie, and the best presentation yet of all of the regular cast members—except for Nichelle and George, who caught the short end of the script this time—and is, at last, a
ST
venture at full length that no one who loves movies can carp about.

But as the film does well in theaters, and as the new series is prepared for nationwide syndication, as the fast-food joints market their
ST
glasses and the K-Marts hawk their
ST
lunch boxes, we must recognize that a miracle has been passed.

Star Trek
has, at last, become more than an underground fetish; it has surpassed the mingy goal of networks and studios for a five-season run; it has gone beyond an addiction that needs a filmic fix every two or three years; it is larger than just a tv/movie staple, like the boring James Bond things that come to us as regularly as summer colds. It has absorbed its own legend and hewn a niche in posterity against all odds.

The series had serious flaws, taken as a whole. The studio and the network were never comfortable with it, and did little to preserve it. The first two films were, at best, cannon fodder. Its greatest strength, the seven or eight fine actors who comprise the crew of the
Enterprise—
with the exceptions, of course, of Shatner and Nimoy—have been used badly and treated on too many occasions as spear-carriers for name guest actors or special effects trickery. The pandering to trekkies, trekists, trekkers and trekoids has been shameless, to the detriment of chance-taking and plots that ventured farther afield.

Despite all that,
Star Trek
has held on. It has clawed its way out of the genre category to become a universal part of the American cultural scene. And
Star Trek IV
(about whose plot I need say nothing, for you have either seen it and know it, or haven't seen it and don't need to spoil it) is the first light on
ST's
road into the future.
Star Trek
is now a given. It has swallowed the inadequacies of its past, and now can do no wrong. The new series, and however many full-length films there may be, are now assured of an unstinting affection usually reserved for Lindberghs or Rutans & Yeagers. It is a seamless whole, a household word, the speaking of whose title conjures memories and an all-encompassing warmth for several generations who have grown up with these space adventurers. Like Tarzan and Robin Hood and Sherlock Holmes, like Mickey Mouse and Superman and Hamlet, they are forever. Or as close to forever as a nation rushing toward total illiteracy can proffer.

Thus, when Walter asked me how he had performed in this latest icon of the legend, my response was as
de facto
as that of the ballerina in
The Red Shoes
who, when asked by the impresario, "Why must you dance?" replied almost without thinking, "Why must you breathe?"

I am guilty of forgetting that Walter is, among his many other personas, an actor. And actors need to hear if they did the acting well or badly. I am guilty of thinking (for the first time, and without recognizing the shift in my own perceptions) of Chekov as part of a gestalt, and a gestalt that worked so wonderfully well for me, for the first time, that I overlooked Walter's need as a human being to be singled out.

I am guilty of consigning Walter Koenig to the seamless oneness of the
Star Trek
mythos. If a brick had asked me how well it had performed as a brick, I would have said, "Your wall holds up the roof splendidly." That is at once ennobling him and demeaning him. But until I said it, and until I worried the repercussions of having said it, I did not understand that the miracle had been passed, and that
Star Trek
had become something about which ordinary criticism could not be ventured, at risk of being beside-the-point or redundant.

Like the politician whose nobility in high office blots out all the picayune malfeasances on the way to investiture as icon,
ST
has eaten its past and has lit its way into the annals of Art that is beyond Entertainment.

That I find myself saying all this, after more than twenty years, surprises me as much as you.

Now if Koenig will just lighten up, perhaps I can concentrate on the creation of the universe, and other less knotty problems, such as
when the hell will this damned jet land!?!

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ May 1987

I was talking to Woody Allen the other afternoon, as we sat together in a bathyscaphe at the bottom of the Cayman Trench, trying to decide if marshmallow toppings on our hot fudge sundaes was Us or Non-Us, and he looked at me out of the middle of a conversation about something else entirely, and he asked me, "How come they've never given me a Hugo award? Whaddaya think, anti-Semitism?"

Startled? Well, just you bet I was. It took me a while to recover, and while so doing I kinda fumfuh'd and assured him, "It's not because you're a Jew. They're
forever
giving Hugos to Jews. They gave one just a while ago to Orson Scott Card, and
he's
a Jew. They even gave me one last year, and I'm sure they know I'm Jewish. Of course, they keep nominating Silverberg and then give the award to anybody else in the category, so maybe it has something to do with
sounding
, as if you're Jewish. We could get Sam Moskowitz to do a paper on it."

Then I shrugged and said, "What the hell do you expect from such schmucks? They gave a Hugo to that piece of drippy dreck,
Back to the Future
, and ignored
Brazil
. They didn't even put
The Purple Rose of Cairo
on the final ballot. Go figure."

Woody looked forlorn. I was getting a tot forlorn myself. "But I've done so
much
fantasy and science fiction," he said. There was a lamentable
Weltschmerz
suffusing his words, a gray threnody undertoning his precise phraseology. "
Sleeper
was pure sf. So was
Zelig
. And what about that flying saucer at the end of
Stardust Memories?
Or the fantasy subtext of
A Midsummer Night's Sex Comedy
; or the sperm fantasy segment in
Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Etcetera)
? I bet if L. Ron Hubbard had written
Purple Rose of Cairo
they'd have given it a Hugo . . . I mean, it is sort of a hip, updated version of
Typewriter in the Sky
. Pass the marshmallow topping."