Phoenix Without Ashes (3 page)

But as I sat there in Los Angeles writing my script, I received a call from Mr. Klenman, who was at that moment in Vancouver. “Mr. Ellison,” he said, politely enough, “this is Norman Klenman. Bill Davidson wanted me to call you about
The Starlost.
I’ve read your bible and, frankly, I find it very difficult and confusing—I don’t understand science fiction—but if you want to train me, and pay me the top-of-the-show money the Guild just struck for, I’ll be glad to take a crack at a script for you.” I thanked him and said I’d get back to him when I’d saved my protagonist from peril at the end of act four.

When I walked off the show, guess who they hired not only as story editor, to replace me, but to rewrite my script, as well. If you guessed Golda Meir, you lose. It was Norman Klenman who “don’t understand science fiction.”

My walkout on my brain child, and all that pretty fame and prettier money was well in the wind by the time of Klenman’s call, but I was still intending to write the scripts I’d contracted for, when the following incidents happened, and I knew it was all destined for the ashcan.

I was in Dallas. Guest of honor at a convention where I was trying to summon up the gall to say
The Starlost
would be a dynamite series. I was paged in the lobby. Phone call from Toronto. It was Bill Davidson. The conversation describes, better than ten thousand more words by me, what was wrong with the series:

“Major problems, Harlan,” Davidson said. Panic lived in his voice.

“Okay, tell me what’s the matter,” I said.

“We can’t shoot a fifty-mile-in-diameter biosphere on the ship.”

“Why?”

“Because it looks all fuzzy on the horizon.”

“Look out the window, Bill. Everything
is
fuzzy on the horizon.”

“Yeah, but on TV it all gets muddy in the background. We’re going to have to make it a six-mile biosphere.”

“Whaaaat?!”

“Six miles is the best we can do.”

There is a pivotal element in the pilot script where the hero manages to hide out from a lynch mob. In a fifty-mile biosphere that was possible. In a six-mile biosphere all they’d have to do is link arms and walk across it. “But, Bill, that means I’ll have to rewrite the entire script.”

“Well, that’s the best we can do.”

Then, in a blinding moment of
satori,
I realized, Davidson was wrong, dead wrong. His thinking was so limited he was willing to scrap the logic of the script rather than think it through. “Bill,” I said, “who can tell the difference on a TV screen, whether the horizon is six miles away or fifty? And since we’re showing them an enclosed world that’s never existed before, why
shouldn’t
it look like that! Shoot
de facto
six miles and call it fifty; it doesn’t make any damned difference!”

There was a pause, then, “I never thought of that.”

Only one indication of the unimaginative, hidebound, and obstinately arrogant thinking that emerged from total unfamiliarity with the subject, proceeded through mistake after mistake, and foundered on the rocks of inability to admit confusion.

The conversation went on with Davidson telling me that even if Trumbull’s effects didn’t work and they couldn’t shoot a fifty-mile biosphere—after he’d just admitted that it didn’t matter
what
distance they said they were showing—I’d simply
love
the set they were building of the control room.

“You’re building the
control
room?” I said, aghast with confusion and disbelief. “But you won’t need that till the last segment of the series. Why are you building it now?”

(It should be noted that one of the Maltese Falcons of the series, one of the prime mysteries, is the location of the control room biosphere. When they find it, they can put the ark back on course. If they find it in the first segment, it automatically becomes the shortest TV series in history.)

“Because you had it in your bible,” he explained.

“That was intended to show how the series ended, for God’s sake!” I admit I was screaming at that point. “If they find it first time out, we can all pack our bags and show an hour of recorded organ music!”

“No, no,” Davidson argued, “they still have to find the backup controls, don’t they?”

“Aaaaarghh,” I aaaarghhed. “Do you have even the faintest scintilla of an idea what a backup control
is?”

“Uh, no. What is it?”

“It’s a fail-safe system, you drooling imbecile; it’s what they use if the primary fails. The primary is the control... oh, to hell with it!” I hung up.

When I returned to Los Angeles, I found matters had degenerated even further. They were shooting a six-mile biosphere and
calling
it six miles. They said no one would notice the discrepancy in the plot. They were building the control room, with that arrogant ignorance that could not be argued with. Ben Bova, who was the technical adviser, had warned them they were going about it in the wrong way. They nodded their heads... and ignored him.

Then Klenman rewrote me. Oh boy.

As an indication of the level of mediocrity they were seeking, “Phoenix Without Ashes” had been retitled, in one of the great artistic strokes of all time, “Voyage of Discovery.” I sent them word they would have to take my name off the show as creator and as writer of that segment. But they would have to use my pseudonym, to protect my royalties and residuals. (They had gang-banged my creation, but I’d be damned if I’d let them profit any further from the rape.)

Davidson reluctantly agreed. He knew the Writers Guild contract guaranteed me that one last weapon. “What’s your pen name? We’ll use it. What is it?”

“Cordwainer Bird,” I said. “That’s b-i-r-d, as in ‘for the birds.’”

Now
he
was screaming. He swore they’d fight me, they’d never use it, I was denying them the use of my name that was so valuable with science fiction fans. Never! Never!

God bless the Writers Guild.

If you’d tuned in the show before it vanished from all earthly ken—and ratings guaranteed that hoped-for day was not long in coming—you would have seen a solo credit card that said:

CREATED BY CORDWAINER BIRD

and that was your humble servant saying the Visigoths had won again.

Bova walked off the series the week after Trumbull left. Scientific illiteracies he’d warned them against, such as “radiation virus” (which is an impossibility: radiation is a matter of atoms, viruses are biological entities, even as you and I and Kline and Davidson, I presume), “space senility” (which, I guess, means old, feeble, blathering vacuum), and “solar star” (which is a terrific illiterate redundancy like saying, “I live in a big house home”).

The Starlost
has come up a loser. Once again, because they don’t understand the materials with which they have to work, because they are so tunnel-visioned into thinking every dramatic series can be transliterated from the prosaic and overfamiliar materials of cop, doctor, and cowboy shows, because there was so much money to be skimmed... another attempt at putting sf on the little screen with intelligence has come up a loser.

Have you learned anything? Probably not. Viewers seem not to care about authenticity, accuracy, logic, literacy, inventiveness. Friends call me when they see
The Starlost
(which still has some small syndication life in outlying areas), and they tell me how much they like it. I snarl and hang up on them.

But even though I fell down that rabbit-hole in TV Land and found I was not in Kansas, or any other place that resembled the real world, I had one moment of bright and lovely retribution.

The roof started to fall in on them, just as I’d said it would if they didn’t come up with decent scripts and a production head who knew what he was doing, and they called Gene Roddenberry, the creator of
Star Trek,
and they offered him fifty percent of the show if he’d come up and produce the show out of trouble for them. Gene laughed at them and said what did he need fifty percent of a loser for, he had one hundred percent of two winners of his own. They said they could understand that, but did he have someone else in mind whom he could recommend as producer? Gene said, sure he did.

They made the mistake of asking him who.

He said, “Harlan Ellison. If you hadn’t screwed him so badly, he could have done a good job for you.”

Then
he
hung up on
them.

Which is just what viewers did.

As I’d warned them, NBC received such lousy reviews of the show, they did not pick up the option for an additional eight segments. There were only sixteen episodes of
The Starlost.
I could not watch them. With the exception of watching the abomination created from my script. “Phoenix Without Ashes,” I never saw one of the shows.

Perhaps you were equally as fortunate.

And the only good thing that has come from my association with
The Starlost
is now in your hands. This book, what I take to be a masterful adaptation of my original pilot script for the series, is considerably more than the typical “script-into-potboiler novel.” It is solely and wholly the work of an exciting young sf writer named Ed Bryant. If you aren’t familiar with his special talent, this is a good introduction, and should compel you to look up his two books of short stories. Ed took the script and expanded it in every possible way. It is deeper, richer, more exciting than any ten segments of
any
TV show.

Had I been permitted to creatively steer the show in intelligent and entertaining directions, I would have asked Ed to write some scripts for me. Had I written a book based on my script myself, I would have wanted it to be as good as this one. But in a happy, crazy turn of events, Ed has done the novel himself, and I’m pleased as hell it
wasn’t
me who wrote it. For Ed brings to it his own vision, his uncommon talent, and a reverence for the primacy of the first writer that is a pleasure to behold.

What I’m babbling about, is that this is a helluva good book, and Ed has done a smashing job. Please make no confusion in your minds. He based it on my work and my dream, but it is pure Bryant you’ve got here. Which ought to lead you to his other work, and should serve to warn you that Bryant is a major talent in the field of speculative fiction.

At which point I’ll jump out for a few moments to let Ed tell you about himself. I’ll be back for a few final words. Ed? Are you there?

What’s to say? Okay, the usual. Born 8/27/45 in White Plains, New York. Grew up in Wyoming on a ranch and in a small town (Wheatland). Went to school at the University of Wyoming, getting B.A. and M.A. degrees in English in ‘67 and ‘68. In the meantime working for small-town radio stations and diligently laboring in a stirrup buckle factory; not to forget working summers hauling baled hay and building fence.

In 1968 I discovered that the Department of State was rejecting, out-of-hand, Foreign Service Exam passers who also happened to be diabetic. Also I was sick of graduate school and reasonably sure I didn’t want to teach literature in some obscure junior college. I attended the first Clarion Fantasy and Science Fiction Writers’ Workshop that summer and promptly sold my first story (to
Again,
Dangerous Visions).

In 1969 I moved to Los Angeles for a lengthy stay and began selling regularly. Since then I’ve sold about a hundred stories and articles to most of the sf magazines; markets such as
Rolling Stone, National Lampoon, Writer’s Digest, L.A. Free Press,
and
Knight;
and to anthologies like
Orbit, Quark, New Dimensions, The Last Dangerous Visions,
and so many others that Damon Knight suggested in print that I’d copped some sort of obscure record. Some of the stories have been translated into French, Portuguese, and Japanese.

My first book was a hardcover collection called
Among the Dead
(Macmillan, 1973). Some people have had difficulty locating the book because the Library of Congress initially printed up uncountable thousands of library cards for the book as being credited to one “Edwin P. Beckenbach.” No one’s ever explained why. But then I suppose poor Beckenbach has a book on the shelves credited to “Edward Bryant.”

Also in 1973 I co-wrote the screenplay for
The Synar Calculation,
planned by the producers to be an avowed blue-collar monster movie.

So much for the “authorized” biographical facts. (Would anyone believe me if I tried to pass myself off as the last living survivor of the Romanovs? Or even as Lawrence Talbot?)

These days I live in Denver and continue to freelance, occasionally piecing things out with lecturing at schools such as the United States Air Force Academy, El Paso College, and the University of Colorado. At Northwest Community College I was lucky enough to share a lecture series with John Carradine and Vincent Price (don’t bother trying to extrapolate the common factor).

Phoenix Without Ashes
is my first complete novel of speculative fiction. Current projects include
Lynx,
a linear novel;
Cinnabar,
a mosaic novel; and
Billy and the Seal Hunters,
a cautionary “children’s book” for morbid degenerates of all ages.

And I’m a dilettante inland lay-authority on sharks.

Sign off Bryant, enter Ellison for a final comment. This book is the only joy I’ve derived from months of paranoia, rip-off, and seeing my work crippled. But maybe the book is joy enough, if it takes you away from the tube and returns you to the world of personal visions to be found in reading books.

No rose at the top of that mountain of cow flop, but thank God viewers knew enough to turn channels to escape that horrendous odor.

THE STARLOST: UPDATE

On 21 March 1974, Harlan Ellison became the first person in the 26-year history of the Writers Guild of America Awards for Most Outstanding Film/TV Screenplays to win the honor
three
times. Against 400 top submissions his
original version
of the pilot script for “The Starlost,”
Phoenix Without Ashes,
was awarded the highest honor bestowed by the craft guild in Hollywood. It should be noted that the WGA Awards are given
solely
on the basis of written material, with the names of the authors removed, judged by a blue ribbon panel whose identities are kept secret. The winning script was Ellison’s version,
not
the rewritten script that was shot and aired against the creator’s wishes. When Ellison accepted the Award at the 26th Annual Awards Reception in Hollywood, he said, in part, “If the fuckers want to rewrite you... hit ‘em!”