Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed Read online

  It is an arena of such a high mortality rate, in terms of personal pride and creative instincts, that it drives writers of taste and talent either away from the medium entirely, or into the relative safety of the motion picture feature. No one who has talent, of even the most minuscule variety, stays in TV very long. They move on because the restrictions are killing. And thus, you have another reason why there is so much shit on the screens of America today. The good ones go away, and those hours of prime-time viewing need to be filled, with whatever capering or gibbering must be accepted, but filled nonetheless. So the hacks take over. They write fast, take their bread, and split. And another hour of garbage is shoveled out through your set.

  It is a system so insane, so corrupt, that only poseurs, ex-actors or production executives lining their pockets with money from the script budget can hack it for any extended period.

  (Rife with dichotomies—as Susskind would put it—the system encourages the delineation of controversial topics and outright brutality in its news shows [of the “White Paper” and “CBS Reports” ilk], but forbids it in dramatic presentations. Thus they cut the ground out from under the serious dramatist, who wishes to grapple with parlous times, its problems, and the world of reality.)

  Thus, the writer, the lowest level of the Babel pyramid, lives every day with a gagging sense of helplessness. S/he is pre-conditioned and worn down in ways the networks and story editors and producers would not even admit exist. “The writers turn in lousy scripts, we have to save them,” they say. And sometimes they tell the truth. But it is a truth based on the fact that they have driven away the bright young creators, that they have made it a game no sane writer cares to play, that they have set it up so anyone who strives to excel feels like a fool. They have invited the hacks to flourish, and now they have the temerity to bitch about it.

  The truth is simply that the entire concept of modern television is corrupt. Marshall McLuhan has said it: the medium is the massage. Massage, as in “worked-over.” Kneaded, like dough. They want to sell you, and they don’t give a damn what it takes on either side of that commercial to do it. If they can get away with a cheapie show like “Petticoat Junction” rather than a big-budget operation like “Cimarron Strip” (new this season), then so much the better for the coffers. And good writing or bad writing isn’t the question any longer.

  It’s how much can they get away with?

  Until the Mad Hatters and the March Hares of network television get some intensive shock therapy, jolting them back from their Cloud-Cuckoo-Land, the writers—for whom I speak—and you, the viewers—who are criminally silent—will wallow Adam’s Apple-deep in monkey vomit.

  So eat heartily.

  REVEALED AT LAST! WHAT KILLED THE DINOSAURS! AND YOU DON’T LOOK SO TERRIFIC YOURSELF

  It’s all about drinking strange wine.

  It seems disjointed and jumps around like water on a griddle, but it all comes together, so be patient.

  At 9:38 a.m. on July 15th, 1974, about eight minutes into “Suncoast Digest,” a variety show on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, anchorwoman Chris Chubbock, 30, looked straight at the camera and said, “In keeping with Channel 40’s policy of bringing you the latest in blood and guts in living color, you’re going to see another first—an attempt at suicide.”

  Whereupon she pulled a gun out of a shopping bag and blew her brains out, on camera.

  Paragraph 3, preceding, was taken verbatim from an article written by Daniel Schorr for Rolling Stone. I’d heard about the Chubbuck incident, of course, and I admit to filching Mr. Schorr’s sixty concise words because they are concise, and why should I try to improve on precision? As the artist Mark Rothko once put it: “Silence is so accurate.”

  Further, Mr. Schorr perceived in the bizarre death of Chris Chubbuck exactly what I got out of it when I heard the news broadcast the day it happened. She was making a statement about television…on television!

  The art-imitating-life resemblance to Paddy Chayefsky’s film Network should not escape us. I’m sure it wouldn’t have escaped Chris Chubbuck’s attention. Obvious cliche; onward.

  I used to know Dan Blocker, who played Hoss Cartwright on “Bonanza.” He was a wise and a kind man, and there are tens of dozens of people I would much rather see dead than Dan. One time, around lunch-break at Paramount, when I was goofing off on writing a treatment for a Joe Levine film that never got made, and Dan was resting his ass from some dumb horsey number he’d been reshooting all morning, we sat on the steps of the weathered saloon that probably in no way resembled any saloon that had ever existed in Virginia City, Nevada, and we talked about reality versus fantasy. The reality of getting up at five in the morning to get to the studio in time for makeup call and the reality of how bloody much FICA tax they took out of our paychecks and the reality of one of his kids being down with something or other…and the fantasy of not being Dan Blocker, but of being Hoss Cartwright.

  And he told me a scary story. He laughed about it, but it was the laugh of butchers in a slaughterhouse who have to swing the mauls that brain the beeves; who then go home to wash the stink out of their hair from the spattering.

  He told me—and he said this happened all the time, not just in isolated cases—that he had been approached by a little old woman during one of his personal appearances at a rodeo, and the woman had said to him, dead seriously, “Now listen to me, Hoss: when you go home tonight, I want you to tell your daddy, Ben, to get rid of that Chinee fella who cooks for you all. What you need is to get yourself a good woman in there can cook up some decent food for you and your family.”

  So Dan said to her, very politely (because he was one of the most courteous people I’ve ever met), “Excuse me, ma’am, but my name is Dan Blocker. Hoss is just the character I play. When I go home I’ll be going to my house in Los Angeles and my wife and children will be waiting.”

  And she went right on, just a bit affronted because she knew all that, what was the matter with him, did he think she was simple or something, “Yes, I know…but when you go back to the Ponderosa, you just tell your daddy Ben that I said…”

  For her, fantasy and reality were one and the same.

  There was a woman who had the part of a home-wrecker on a daytime soap opera. One day as she was coming out of Lord & Taylor in New York, a viewer began bashing her with an umbrella, calling her filthy names and insisting she should leave that nice man and his wife alone!

  One time during a college lecture, I idly mentioned that I had actually thought up all the words Leonard Nimoy had spoken as Mr. Spock on the sole “Star Trek” segment I had written; and a young man leaped up in the audience, in tears, and began screaming that I was a liar. He actually thought the actors were living those roles as they came across the tube.

  Why do I tell you all this; and what does it have to do with drinking strange wine?

  Chris Chubbuck perceived at a gut level that for too many Americans the only reality is what’s on the box. That Johnny Carson and Don Rickles and Mary Tyler Moore are more real, more substantial, more immediately important than the members of their own family, or the people in their community. She knew that her death wouldn’t be real unless it happened on television, unless it took place where life is lived, there in phosphor-dot Never-Never Land. If she did it decently, in the privacy of her home, or in some late night bar, or in a deserted parking lot…it would never have happened. She would have been flensed from memory as casually as a popped pimple. Her suicide on camera was the supreme act of loathing and ridicule for the monkeymass that watched her.

  When I was writing my television criticism for the Los Angeles Free Press, circa 1968-1972, I used The Glass Teat columns to repeat my belief that those of us who cared, who had some ethics and some talent, dared not abandon to the Visigoths what was potentially the most powerful medium the world had ever known for the dissemination of education and knowledge. I truly believed that. And I said it again and again.

  But it’s been five years since I last
wrote those words, and I’ve done so many college speaking engagements that Grand Forks, North Dakota, has blurred with Minneapolis, Minnesota, has blurred with Bethel, Maine, has blurred with Shreveport, Louisiana, and what I’ve come away with is a growing horror at what television has done to us.

  I now believe that television itself, the medium of sitting in front of a magic box that pulses images at us endlessly, the act of watching TV, per se, is mind crushing. It is soul deadening, dehumanizing, soporific in a poisonous way, ultimately brutalizing. It is, simply put so you cannot mistake my meaning, a bad thing.

  We need never fear Orwell’s 1984, because it’s here, with us now, nearly a decade ahead of schedule, and has been with us for quite a while already. Witness the power of television and the impact it has had on you.

  Don’t write me letters telling me, how you’ve escaped the terror, how you’re not a slave to the box, how you still read and listen to Brahms and carry on meaningful discussions with your equally liberated friends. Stop and really take stock of how many hours last week you sat stunned before the tube, relaxing, just unwinding, just passing a little time between the demanding and excoriating life-interests that really command your energies. You will be stunned again, if you are honest. Because I did it, and it scared me, genuinely put a fright into me. It was far more time than I’d have considered feasible, knowing how much I despise television and how little there is I care to watch.

  I rise, usually, between five and seven in the morning, depending how late I’ve worked the night before. I work like a lunatic all day…I’m a workaholic…pity me…and by five or six in the evening I have to unwind. So I lie down and turn on the set. Where before I might have picked up a book of light fiction, or dozed, or just sighed and stared at the ceiling, now I turn on the carnivorous coaxial creature.

  And I watch.

  Here in Los Angeles between five and eight, when “Prime Time” begins (oh, how I love that semantically twisted phrase) we have the same drivel you have in your city. Time that was taken from the networks to program material of local interest and edification. Like reruns of “Adam-12,” “The Price Is Right,” “The Joker’s Wild,” “Name That Tune,” “I Dream of Jeannie,” “Bewitched,” “Concentration,” and “Match Game P.M.” I lie there like the quadruple amputee viewpoint character of Dalton Trumbo’s Johnny Got His Gun, never speaking, breathing shallowly, seeing only what flashes before my eyes, reduced to a ganglial image receptor, a raw nerve-end taking in whatever banalities and incredible stupdities they care to throw at me in the name of “giving the audience what they want.”

  If functional illiterates failing such mind-challenging questions as “What was the name of the character Robert Stack played on ‘The Untouchables’?” is an accurate representation of “what the audience wants,” then my point has been solidly made…

  …and it goes directly to the answer to the question of what killed the dinosaurs and you don’t look so terrific yourself!

  But I wander. So. I lie there, until my low bullshit threshold is reached, either through the zombie mannerisms of the “Adam-12” cops—dehumanized paragons of a virtue never known by L.A.’s former lunatic chief of police, Weirdo Ed Davis—or because of some yotz on The Price Is Right having an orgasm at winning a thirty-year supply of rectal suppositories. And then I curse, snap off the set, and realize I’ve been lying there for ninety minutes.

  And when I take stock of how much time I’m spending in front of that set, either at the five-to-eight break or around eleven o’clock when I fall into bed for another break and turn on “The CBS Late Movie,” I become aware of five hours spent in mindless sucking at the glass teat.

  If you’re honest, you’ll own up to that much time televiewing, too. Maybe more. Maybe a little less. But you spend from three to eight hours a day at it. And you’re not alone. Nor am I. The college gigs I do have clearly demonstrated that to me. Clearly. I take show-of-hands polls in the audience; and after badgering them to cop to the truth, the vast bulk of the audience admits it, and I see the stunned looks of concern and dawning awareness.

  They never realized it was that much; nor did I.

  And the effect it has had on them, on you, young people and old alike; black and white and Hispanic and Oriental and Amerind; male and female; wealthy and impoverished; WASPs and Jews and Shintoists and Buddhists and Catholics and even Scientologists. All of us, all of you, swamped day after day by stereotypes and jingoism and “accepted” life-styles. So that after a while you come to believe doctors are all wise and noble and one with Marcus Welby and they could cure you of anything if only you’d stop being so cranky and irrational; that cops never abuse their power and are somehow Solomonic in their judgments; that, in the final extreme, violence—as represented by that eloquent vocabulary of a punch in the mouth—solves problems; that women are either cute and cuddly and need a strong hand to keep them in line or defeminize themselves if they have successful careers; and that eating McDonald’s prefab food is actually better for you than foie de veau saute aux fines herbes…and tastier, too.

  I see this zombiatic response in college audiences. It manifests itself most prominently in the kinds of questions that are asked. Here I stand before them, perhaps neither Melville nor Twain, but nonetheless a man with a substantial body of work behind him, books that express the artist’s view of the world (and after all, isn’t that why they paid me two grand or better a night to come and speak? Surely it can’t be my winsome manner!), and they persist in asking me what it was like to work on “Star Trek” or what Jimmy Caan is really like and why did Tom Snyder keep cutting me off on the “Tomorrow” show. I get angry with them. I make myself lots less antic and entertaining. I tell them what I’m telling you here. And they don’t like me for it. As long as I’m running down the military-industrial complex or the fat money cats who play sneaky panther games with our lives, they give me many “Right on, brother!” ovations. But when I tell them how shallow and programmed television is making them, there is a clear lynch tenor in the mob. (It isn’t just college kids, gentle reader. I was recently rewarded with sullen animosity when I spoke to a dinner gathering of Southern California Book Publicists, and instead of blowing smoke up their asses about what a wonderful thing book publicity through the Johnny Carson show is—because there isn’t one of them who wouldn’t sacrifice several quarts of blood to get a client on that detestable viewing ground for banal conversationalists—I quoted them the recent illiteracy figures released by HEW. I pointed out that only 8% of the 220,000,000 population of this country buy books, and of that 8% only 2% buy more than a single book a year. I pointed out that 6% of that measly 8% were no doubt buying, as their single enriching literary experience each year, Jaws or Oliver’s Story or the latest Harold Robbins ghastliness, rather than, say, Remembrance of Things Past or the Durants’ The Lessons of History or even the latest Nabokov or Lessing novel. So that meant they were hustling books to only 2% of the population of this country; while the other 98% sank deeper and deeper into illiteracy and functional illiteracy, their heads being shoved under by the pressure of television, to which they were slavishly making obeisance. They were, in effect, sharpening the blade for their executioner, assisting in their own extinction. They really didn’t want to hear that. Nor do college audiences.)

  A bad thing. Watching television. Not rationalizing it so that it comes out reading thus: “Television is potentially a good thing; it can educate and stimulate and inform us; we’ve just permitted it to be badly used; but if we could get some good stuff on the tube…” No, I’m afraid I’ve gone beyond that rationalization, to an extreme position. The act of watching television for protracted periods (and there’s no way to insure the narcotic effects won’t take you over) is deleterious to the human animal. The medium itself insists you sit there quietly and cease thinking.

  The dinosaurs. How they died.

  Television, quite the opposite of books or even old-time radio that presented drama and comedy and tal
k shows (unlike Top Forty radio programming today, which is merely TV without moving parts), is systematically oriented toward stunning the use of individual imagination. It puts everything out there, right there, so you don’t have to dream even a little bit. When they would broadcast a segment of, say, “Inner Sanctum” in the Forties, and you heard the creaking door of a haunted house, the mind was forced to create the picture of that haunted house—a terrifying place so detailed and terrifying that if Universal Studios wanted to build such an edifice for a TV movie, it would cost them millions of dollars and it still would be one one-millionth as frightening as the one your own imagination had cobbled up.

  A book is a participatory adventure. It involves a creative act at its inception and a creative act when its purpose is fulfilled. The writer dreams the dream and sets it down; the reader reinterprets the dream in personal terms, with personal vision, when he or she reads it. Each creates a world. The template is the book.

  At risk of repeating myself, and of once again cribbing from another writer’s perfection of expression (in this case, my friend Dr. Isaac Asimov), here is a bit I wrote on this subject for an essay on the “craft” of writing teleplays:

  Unlike television, films, football games, the roller derby, wars in underdeveloped nations and Watergate hearings, which are spectator sports, a book requires the activation of its words by the eyes and the intellect of a reader. As Isaac Asimov said recently in an article postulating the perfect entertainment cassette, “A cassette as ordinarily viewed makes sound and casts light. That is its purpose, of course, but must sound and light obtrude on others who are not involved or interested? The ideal cassette would be visible and audible only to the person using it…. We could imagine a cassette that is always in perfect adjustment; that starts automatically when you look at it; that stops automatically when you cease to look at it; that can play forward or backward, quickly or slowly, by skips or with repetitions, entirely at your pleasure…. Surely that’s the ultimate dream device—a cassette that may deal with any of an infinite number of subjects, fictional or non-fictional, that is self-contained, portable, non-energy-consuming, perfectly private and largely under the control of the will…. Must this remain only a dream? Can we expect to have such a cassette some day?…We not only have it now, we have had it for many centuries. The ideal I have described is the printed word, the book, the object you now hold—light, private, and manipulable at will…. Does it seem to you that the book, unlike the cassette I have been describing, does not produce sound and images? It certainly does…. You cannot read without hearing the words in your mind and seeing the images to which they give rise. In fact, they are your sounds and images, not those invented for you by others, and are therefore better…. The printed word presents minimum information, however. Everything but that minimum must be provided by the reader—the intonation of words, the expressions on faces, the actions, the scenery, the background, must all be drawn out of that long line of black-on-white symbols.”