Harlan Ellison's Watching (59 page)

Well, after we surfaced—a bit too rapidly and Woody got the bends and had to be admitted to Flower & Fifth Avenue Hospital—I decided to put some megawattage of thought into this apparent unfairness, prompted by Woody's last words to me as he was schlepped away on the gurney: "Do you think they'll even notice that my new film,
Radio Days
(Orion Pictures), is a loving tribute to the sense of wonder?"

So I thunk about it some heavy. One doesn't like to think s/he is wasting his/her time on a species that watches wrestling on television—staged bogus "feuds" everyone
knows
are lousy choreography neither The Supremes nor The Temptations would tolerate, among grown men who, if they dressed that way in the city streets, would not only make Mr. Blackwell's Worst-Dressed List every year, but might be netted and taken in for psychiatric evaluation—voluntarily buys Barry Manilow, Prince and Beastie Boys albums; bans forty-five textbooks in Alabama because they contain humanistic values, on the bonkers theory that "humanism" is a religion; complains because it isn't permitted to fuck up other people's lungs with cigarette smoke on the Me-First grounds that their civil rights are being infringed; and gives Hugos to dopey flicks like
Back to the Future
while ignoring
Brazil
and
The Purple Rose of Cairo
.

I mean, if you don't mind slapstick burping from alien critters, then I suppose
Enemy Mine
is a great film; but by the same judgment, so is
Porky's
.

And I was ready to pack it in, throw up my hands as well as my lunch, and just say to hell with it, give the whole inhabited parking lot to the cockroaches!

But suddenly I remembered this great quote from John Simon, a critic most of you can't stand because he's smarter than you and I and George Bush,
en masse, en grande tenue, en casserole
; and just because he had the honesty once to point out that Liza Minnelli has about as much talent as a rug-beater and looks a whole lot like a plucked chicken, you all get down on his case and think him a meanie. Well, I'm here to tell you he's no meaner than I. And so . . . he said this thing that gave me pause:

"The ultimate evil is the weakness, cowardice, that is one of the constituents of so much human nature. When, rarely, unalloyed nobility does occur, its chances of prevailing are slim. Yet it exists, and its mere existence is reason enough for not wiping the name of mankind off the slate."

The thought of nobility, as manifested in the art and craft of Woody Allen, came to the rescue. In a week during which I sat through the entertaining but outstandingly mindless
Lethal Weapon; Heat
, the latest Burt Reynolds gawdawfuller, made even more unpalatable by having been lugubriously scripted by William Goldman from his dreary novel (a situation that distresses me more than I can say, for one of my all-time favorite writers has been Bill Goldman, whose fiction—with intermittent echoes of the books of grandeur
—The Temple of Gold, The Thing of It Is, No Way to Treat a Lady, Soldier in the Rain, The Silent Gondoliers
, and
Marathon Man—
for the past eleven years has seemed to me more and more slapdash, more and more written as way-station incarnation on the way to becoming screenplays); and
Mannequin
, a sophomoric "youth-oriented" ripoff of
One Touch of Venus, Pygmalion
and John Collier's "Evening Primrose," well, in such a week the thought of Woody Allen somehow keeps me from taking the gas pipe, saves the world from being consigned to the
cucarachas
.

But I think of Woody lying there in the hospital, losing all fight to live as he becomes more forlorn in the contemplation that the fans who vote the Hugo awards will not understand that
Radio Days
is a wondrous paean to the joys of imagination. Is the cockroach creator equivalent of Woody waiting to be born out there in some damp sewer? Will the insects have more love for
their
special visionaries? On some day a mere dozen million years from now, will the Academy of Orthopterous Arts & Sciences convey to that splendid
Periplaneta americana
, all six legs' worth of him, the entomological equivalent of an Oscar, while insect fandom bestows the Jiminy on
Larva Trek IV?

My mind whirls.

Can I be the only reader of fantastic literature to perceive that Woody Allen has been, and continues to be, one of our best filmic interpreters of that
je ne sais quoi
we call "the sense of wonder"? Surely not. Surely some other observer of the flickering screen image has stumbled on this obvious truth!

But I search in vain through all the treatises on Woody, and I find no support for my theory. Nowhere outside the specialist semiotics of cinema lucubration (do I speak their langwidge or don't I!?) analyzing
The Terminator
till one could retch; nowhere in the totality of non-fantasy incunabula. They talk of his ambivalence between roots as a Brooklyn Jew and foliage as an adult who wants to make it with
goyishe
cheerleaders. They prate of his influences; from Wittgenstein to Ingmar Bergman. They totemize him as the germinal influence in raising the nerd to hunk status. But nowhere does anyone simply say, "This guy has a for-real science-fictional-fantasy outlook."

So in the spirit of unalloyed nobility, I bring to the wandering attention of the genre audience that has poured millions into the pockets of Spielberg and Lucas, the advisement that
Radio Days
is a miraculous fantasy of imagination, drenched in the sense of wonder. A film about those of us who learned the universe is filled with magic through the medium of voices drifting to us in the night. The days of radio listening, the days before television turned us into wombats who will tolerate the cacophony of John Madden's voice, the empty Barbie-ism of Vanna White, the sleaze of telemogrified Judith Krantz potboilers; the days of adventure and suspense and drama that we conjured in our own minds, without recourse to the production budgets of businessmen in charge of an art-form; the days of The Green Hornet and Jack Armstrong and Buck Rogers and Sam Spade; the days when listening to the radio was an integral part of one's education, rather than an induced zombieism, an interruption of life, sitting goggle-eyed before that box that permits of no imaginative participation from the drowsing dreamer.

Radio Days
, a kind of cockeyed and utterly dear variation on the multiple-plot-thread structure Buñuel pioneered in
The Phantom of Liberty
(what Leonard Maltin calls "a dreamlike comedy of irony, composed of surreal, randomly connected anecdotes"); it is narrated by Woody, word-painting a portrait of life in America in the early Forties, when one's imagination could encompass a wealthy playboy whose alter ego could cloud men's minds so they could not see him, a temple of vampires through which a Jack, Doc and Reggie would wander in constant jeopardy, and a "Masked Avenger" whom we did not need to see in the flesh of Wallace Shawn to understand the nature of Good and Evil. In
Radio Days—
absolutely dripping with scenes that could make a paving stone roar with laughter—Woody Allen has created a fantasy structure of affection and memory that no one over the age of forty dare miss at peril of forgetting how wonderful was that time of youth, a film that no one
under
the age of forty dare miss at peril of being misled into accepting the squalor of television as the best of all possible mediums.

I have told you nothing much of the plot. That's not my job. I wouldn't steal an instant of
Radio Days
from your joy of discovery. But in the name of unalloyed nobility I beg you to do yourself a favor . . . go see it. Don't wait for the cassette . . . go see it. See it today, this very evening, and then go see it next week, to prove to yourself that the rush you got was not an aberration.

And send a get-well card to Woody. Tell him Harlan sent you.

Woody, that brave little beast (as Moorcock once called your humble columnist), was the fauna (or is it
faunum?
) (what the hell
is
the singular of fauna?) (who the hell am I?) (it only hurts when I screw the electrodes too tightly, doctor) who saved all of us from the cockroaches, but to buttress my new faith in the human race you also have to thank the flora called Audrey. A bloodsucking, flesh-nibbling, badass-talking, monomaniacal plant that dominates the spectacularly enjoyable
Little Shop of Horrors
(Warner Brothers).

I, like you, enjoyed the old Roger Gorman film of 1960; I, like you, applauded the 1982 off-Broadway musical version; but neither predisposition to be charmed provided one one-millionth of the pleasure I derived from this film. Ellen Greene, Rick Moranis, Vincent Gardenia and a Greek Chorus of (Supremes-)
manqués
simply wow the spats off you. And one may now add to the W. C. Fields list of those with whom a smart actor should never work—dogs and children—talking plants. Because as sublimely cavorting as the people are, Audrey damned near steals the film. Howard Ashman's screenplay adds an almost believable sf rationale to the absolutely believable fantasy of it all, and gives Audrey a
raison d'être
for fly trap behavior that was absent in the Gorman original; a conceit that enhances the story immeasurably.

Flora and fauna. Came they hence to save y'all from paying property taxes to the termites, tithes to the cockroaches, dues to the potato bugs. And I'm feeling so
up
about a human race that includes Woody Allen and Howard Ashman, if the bugs try to claim dominion I'm prepared to introduce them to Audrey.

ANCILLARY MATTERS: The follow-up essay on new technology of the Dr. Frankenstein style is in the works. Joe Dante is busy editing his new film, so we haven't had a chance yet to go do the Sam Spadework. Be patient. But until that time, let us stop referring to the depredations visited on
The Maltese Falcon
, et al., as "colorization." Colorization is the trademarked process and the name of the company that does the butchery. What it is, folks, is simply
coloring
. Apart from resisting the academese of what R. Mitchell calls "the educationists," we must not permit the coloring thugs to get us thinking their way at all. If we begin by using their heavy-breathing circumlocutions (like calling rebel insurgents "freedom fighters" and the napalming of villages as "Operation Sunshine"), then too soon we will not perceive that when Reagan's current mouthpiece says, "Yesterday's statements are inoperative," it is simply doublespeak for, "What he told you yesterday was a lie," and then, finally, they may be able to convince us that "colorization" is something nobler than parvenus with computer Crayolas. So eschew "colorization," good readers. Call it what it is, call it coloring. Call it
merde
.

Also in work is the long study of David Cronenberg's films. I've been busy writing a pilot film for NBC and Roger Gorman, completing
The Last Dangerous Visions
, putting together a volume of film essays that include these columns, handing in
The Harlan Ellison Hornbook
to Jack Chalker, who's been waiting more than ten years for it, and in general trying to clear away all my debts to people like Stuart Schiff, who has been patient to the point of beatification. So please don't
nuhdz
me; when it gets written, it'll get written.

And finally, I must bring to your attention volume two of a work already noted in these columns.

Bill Warren, who knows more than any person in his or her right mind ought to know about American science fiction films of the fifties, gave us volume one of
Keep Watching the Skies!
in 1982. He has now lost complete control of the beast, and volume two, at 839 pages with a price tag of $39.95, has escaped to terrorize a placid world and
 . . . it's alive!

If you missed volume one—a mere piddly 467 pages covering hundreds of films released between 1950 and 1957—a staggering compendium of wise, witty, weird essays on everything from
Abbott and Costello Go to Mars
to
Zontar the Thing from Venus
, then fer pete's sake don't let volume two slip past you.

Yes, these books are pricey. (Of course, if you buy them separately they're $39.95 each, but if you buy the duo, it's only $65.00.) But, on my oath as a methane-breathing entity, this is a buck well spent. Warren doesn't merely give you the plot synopsis and the cast and the rest of the creative team, he doesn't merely put the film into historical and cinematic context, he doesn't merely describe the advertising and promotion and effect the film had on America as a whole or the sf world in part, he also lavishes each essay with bits of minutiae, arcane knowledge, bizarre connections and berserk influences, sidebar comments about the personal lives of the stars and writers and directors and producers. But on the plus side he does it with an absolutely charming affection for even the worst dog, the most inept pig, the lamest dromedary of a stinkeroo. Bill Warren really and truly
loves
this stuff, and his honest obsession cannot be resisted.

Volume two covers 1958 through 1962, with appendixes that list full cast and credits, order of release of the films, announced (but not produced) titles, a bibliography, an addendum and an index to the more hundreds of movies that Bill has sat through from beginning to end so we don't have to.

These are the sort of books one keeps to hand in the bathroom. As those of you who read understand, that is high compliment indeed. The potty is the last private place for a reader in the world. No one bothers you. Unless you live in large Italian family, which is another sociological can of worms entirely. But you can't be in there
too
long, or someone will think you're enjoying yourself in ways you're not supposed to, so you have to have reading material that can be enjoyed in medium-short bursts.
Time
is okay, and a book of Fredric Brown's short stories; comic books work well, and
The National Review
(because
no
one can read it for very long without throwing it across the toilet into the tub). Which is to say,
Keep Watching the Skies
is made up of delicious morsels that can be enjoyed over a long period of time. At peace, and with pleasure.