Dreamsongs. Volume II Page 10

  Yet even as The Armageddon Rag slammed one door shut behind me, it was opening another. Dismal though its sales had been, the Rag did have its ardent fans. One was Phil DeGuere, the creator and executive producer of the hit television series Simon & Simon. DeGuere was a huge fan of rock music, especially the Grateful Dead. When our mutual agent Marvin Moss showed him my book, Phil saw a feature film in it, and optioned the movie rights. He intended to write and direct the film himself, and to shoot the huge concert sequences at Grateful Dead shows.

  I’d sold other film options previously. My usual involvement was limited to signing the contract and cashing the check. Phil DeGuere was different. The ink was hardly dry on the deal before he flew me out to L.A. and put me up at a hotel for several days, so we could talk about the book and how best to adapt it. Phil went on to write several drafts of the screenplay, but was never able to get a studio to bite for the financing. No movie was made. During the course of this, however, he and I got to know each other a bit…enough so that, when he decided to revive The Twilight Zone for CBS in 1985, Phil phoned to ask me if I would like to try a script.

  Surprisingly, I did not immediately leap at the chance. I had been weaned on television, sure, but I’d never written for it, had never wanted to write for it, knew nothing about scriptwriting, had never even seen a screenplay or a teleplay. Besides, all you ever heard about writing for Hollywood was the horror stories. I’d read Harlan Ellison’s Glass Teat, after all. I’d even read The Other Glass Teat. I knew how crazy it was out there.

  On the other hand, I liked Phil and respected him, and he had Alan Brennert on his staff, another writer whose work I had admired. DeGuere had brought Harlan Ellison aboard as well, as a writer and consultant. Maybe this new Twilight Zone would be different. And if truth be told, I needed the money. At the time I was madly writing Haviland Tuf stories to fill out Tuf Voyaging and keep my mortgage paid, but Black and White and Red All Over still had not sold, and my career as a novelist lay in ruins. I was still hesitating when Phil cinched the deal by promising my lady Parris backstage passes to all the Grateful Dead shows we cared to see. You couldn’t say no to that.

  He mailed me the show’s bible and a stack of sample scripts, and I sent him a stack of tearsheets and xerox copies of stories I thought might make good Twilight Zone episodes. Since I had never done a teleplay before, I wanted to make things easier for myself by doing an adaptation rather than an original story. That way, I could concentrate on mastering the form, rather than having to come up with the plot and characters and dialogue as well. Adaptations did not pay as well as originals, but I was more concerned with not making an utter fool of myself than I was with making money.

  DeGuere liked a number of the stories I sent them, and half a dozen would end up becoming episodes of TZ-2, some adapted by me, some by other hands. For my first outing, however, the tale that was chosen was “Nackles,” a Christmas horror fable by a writer named Curt Clark. I’d found it in an obscure Terry Carr anthology.

  “Nackles” was the sort of idea that makes you slap your head and cry, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Every god must have his devil. Nackles was the Anti-Santa. On Christmas Eve, while Santa Claus is flying around the world in his sled, sliding down chimneys to leave presents for good boys and girls, Nackles is moving through pitch-dark tunnels beneath the earth in a railroad car pulled by a team of blind white goats, and crawling up through the furnace grate to stuff bad boys and girls in his big black sack.

  I was delighted by Phil’s choice. “Nackles” seemed to me to be a perfect Twilight Zone, given a faithful adaptation. I also took a little pleasure imagining the thrill the sale would give Curt Clark, this obscure, forgotten little writer, who I pictured teaching English composition at some community college in Nowhere, North Dakota or Godforsaken, Georgia.

  It turned out that “Curt Clark” was a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake, the bestselling author of the wonderful Dortmunder series and a hundred other mysteries and crime novels, half of which had been turned into feature films. It also turned out, once rights had been secured and I had signed my contract, that the guys at Twilight Zone did not want a faithful adaptation of Westlake’s story. They liked the notion of the Anti-Santa, but not the rest of it: the abusive former football star who invents Nackles to terrorize his children, his wife and kids, the brother-in-law who narrates the story. All of that had to go, I was told. Before I could start my script, I would need to come up with a whole new story for Nackles and present it in a treatment.

  (So much for adaptations being easier.)

  I came up with half a dozen ways to handle “Nackles.” The first one or two I wrote up as formal treatments, the later ones I pitched to Harlan over the phone. He didn’t like any of them. After a month of this, I hit a wall. I had no more fresh ideas for “Nackles,” and remained convinced that the best way to handle the material was the way Westlake handled it in his story. Harlan was growing as frustrated as I was, and I got the impression that Phil DeGuere was ready to pull the plug.

  At that point Harlan came up with an idea. Another episode had also been giving trouble, an original called “The Once and Future King,” about an Elvis impersonator who travels back in time and finds himself face-to-face with Elvis. A freelancer named Bryce Maritano had done several drafts of the script, but DeGuere and his team still felt it needed work. I was no stranger to rock ’n’ roll, as The Armageddon Rag bore witness. Harlan suggested a switch. He would take over “Nackles” himself, and I would move to the Maritano script. Phil thought that was worth a try, and the swap was made…with fateful consequences for all concerned.

  The subsequent tale of “Nackles” is as horrifying as Nackles himself. Harlan Ellison’s approach to the story met with more approval than mine had, and his script was duly written and given the green light. Ed Asner was cast in the lead role, and Harlan himself was set to direct. He had added a new twist to the Westlake story, however, one that drew the ire of the network censors. In the midst of preproduction, “Nackles” was brought to a screeching halt by Standards and Practices. For those who are curious, all the grisly details of what followed can be found in Harlan’s collection Slippage (Houghton Mifflin, 1998), along with Westlake’s original story and Harlan’s teleplay. Despite good faith efforts by Phil and Harlan to address the network’s concerns, the CBS censors proved unrelenting. “Nackles” was scrapped, and Harlan left the show.

  Meanwhile, I was still at home in Santa Fe, a thousand miles away from the storms, reading up about the King. Elvis had shouldered Nackles aside. I wrote my treatment of “The Once and Future King,” and when that was approved, I launched into the script. It was the first teleplay I had ever attempted, so it took me longer than it should have. I shot it off to The Twilight Zone with considerable trepidation. If Phil did not like what I’d done, I figured, my first teleplay would also be my last.

  He did like it. Not well enough to shoot my first draft, mind you (I soon learned that in Hollywood no one ever likes a script that much)…but well enough to offer me a staff job after “Nackles” blew up and Harlan’s departure left the Zone shorthanded. Suddenly I was off to a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas, somewhere between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge: Studio City, California.

  I joined the series near the end of its first season, as a lowly Staff Writer (you know the position is lowly if the title includes the word “writer”). My first contract was for six weeks, and even that seemed optimistic. After a strong start, the ratings for TZ-2 had slumped off steadily, and no one knew whether CBS would renew the series for a second season. I began my stint by doing several more drafts of “The Once and Future King,” then moved on to new scripts, adaptations of Roger Zelazny’s “The Last Defender of Camelot” and Phyllis Eisenstein’s “Lost and Found.” Six weeks of talking story with DeGuere, Crocker, Brennert, and O’Bannon, reading scripts, giving and taking notes, sitting in on pitch meetings, and watching the show being f
ilmed taught me more than I could have learned in six years back in Santa Fe. None of my own scripts went before the cameras until the very end, when “The Last Defender of Camelot” was finally sent into production.

  Casting, budgets, preproduction meetings, working with a director; all of it was new to me. My script was too long and too expensive. That would prove to be a hallmark of my career in film and television. All my scripts would be too long and too expensive. I tried to keep Roger Zelazny informed of all the changes we had to make, so he would not be too taken aback when he saw his story on the air. At one point, our line producer Harvey Frand came to me with a worried look on his face. “You can have horses,” he told me, “or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses and Stonehenge.” That was a hard call, so I put the question to Roger. “Stonehenge,” he said at once, and Stonehenge it was.

  They built it on the sound stage behind my office, with wood and plaster and painted canvas. If there had been horses on the stage, Stonehenge would have trembled like a leaf every time one pounded by, but without horses, the fake rocks worked fine. Not so the stuntwork, alas. The director wanted to see Sir Lancelot’s face during the climactic swordfight, which entailed removing the visor from Richard Kiley’s helm…and that of his stunt double as well. All went well until someone zigged instead of zagging during the swordplay, and the stunt man’s nose was cut off. “Not the whole nose,” Harvey Frand explained to me, “just the end bit.”

  “The Last Defender of Camelot” was broadcast on April 11, 1986, as part of TZ-2’s first season closer. After we wrapped I went home to Santa Fe, not knowing if there would be a second season. For all I knew, my brief stint in television was done.

  But when the networks announced their fall schedules in May, it turned out that CBS had renewed The Twilight Zone after all. I was promoted from Staff Writer to Story Editor, and headed back to Studio City. Several new writers and producers joined us for that abbreviated second season, most notably Michael Cassutt, who took my place at the bottom of the food chain as the lowly Staff Writer. Cassutt had the office next to mine. Short, cynical, talented, funny, and wise in all the ways of Hollyweird, he showed me how to get a better office (come to work early and move in), and joined me in trying to teach Phil DeGuere’s cockatoo to say, “Stupid idea,” which we thought would enliven pitch meetings no end.

  The second season of TZ-2 got off to a great start for me. Both of my leftover season one scripts, “Lost and Found” and “The Once and Future King,” were put into production; the latter became our second-season opener. As Story Editor, I did more duties, more rewrites, and had a bigger role in pitch meetings. I wrote two new teleplays as well. “The Toys of Caliban” was another adaptation, this time of a story by Terry Matz. “The Road Less Traveled,” which you’ll find presented here, was my first (and last) original for the Zone. The idea was one that I’d come up with a few years earlier for an anthology about the War in Vietnam, but had never gotten around to writing.

  On an anthology show like The Twilight Zone, the stories are the stars. We had no leads with fat weekly salaries, no recurring characters to service, no continuing storylines. As a result we could sometimes attract feature actors and directors who would never have consented to appear on an ordinary episodic drama. I got very lucky with “The Road Less Traveled.” My script was sent to Wes Craven. He liked it, and agreed to direct.

  We speak of television programs running an hour (most dramas) or a half-hour (all sitcoms), but of course the shows themselves are nowhere near that long, since commercials eat up a large amount of that time. In the mid ‘80s, an “hour-long” drama was roughly forty-six minutes long, a “half-hour” sitcom about twenty-three minutes.

  Of course, when you shoot a script, it is very rare that you will get exactly as much film as you need. Most rough cuts run long, by anywhere from a few seconds to a few minutes. No problem. The show’s editors, working with the director and the producers, simply take the tape into the editing room and trim, until they have forty-six or twenty-three minutes of footage, as required.

  Rod Serling’s original Twilight Zone was a half-hour program for most of its run. It is those episodes that most fans recall. The show actually expanded to a “full hour” for one season, but those hours are seldom seen in syndication, since they will not fit into the same time slots as the rest of the series run. Whether an hour or a half-hour, however, Serling’s Twilight Zone featured only one story per episode.

  TZ-2 was an hour-long show, but it used the format of another Serling series, The Night Gallery, rather than that of the original Zone. Each hour was made up of two or three unconnected tales of varying length. It was seldom as neat as dividing one forty-six-minute hour into two twenty-three-minute half-hours. One week, the show might have a thirty-minute episode teamed with one that ran sixteen minutes; the next week, a twenty-one-minute segment with a twenty-five; the week after an eighteen, a fifteen, and a thirteen. It did not matter how long the individual segments ran, so long as they added up to forty-six minutes after editing.

  “The Road Less Traveled” was too long (and too expensive). But it was felt to be a strong script, and had a very strong director in Wes Craven, who shot some terrific film. When Wes turned in his director’s cut, it was longer than all but a few of our previous segments, but it was also a powerful little film. The decision was made to make only minor trims to Wes Craven’s cut. If the hour ran long, time could always be taken out of the other segment to get us down to the necessary forty-six minutes.

  The show as finally assembled paired a thirty-six minute cut of “The Road Less Traveled” with a ten-minute version of…well, to tell the truth, I no longer recall which second-season episode I had drawn as my running mate. The show was edited, color-timed, scored. Effects were added, along with the opening and closing narrations. Around the office, Mike Cassutt and my other friends were congratulating me. There was talk of Emmy Awards for Wes Craven and Cliff DeYoung. The show was delivered to the network, locked and finished and ready for broadcast.

  Then CBS took The Twilight Zone off the air.

  It should not have come as a shock. Our ratings had been weak at the end of the first season, and had only gotten weaker during the second. Even so, the network was not canceling the show. Not quite. Instead they were taking us off the air for “retooling.”

  Gloom descended on the MTM lot as we sat around our offices waiting for the other shoe to drop. Soon enough it did. We were going back on the air, in a new time slot…as a half-hour show. The original Twilight Zone had enjoyed its greatest success as a half-hour, CBS reasoned; perhaps we could do the same. And by the way, no more of this two or three stories per show stuff. From now on each episode would be a single story, twenty-three minutes in length. As for those episodes already in the can, they would have to be re-edited to fit the new half-hour format.

  “The Road Less Traveled” was broadcast on December 18, 1986, but it was not the show that I had been so proud of. A truncated, mutilated remnant aired instead. Thirteen minutes had been excised, more than a third of the episode’s original length. The pacing was shot to hell, and much of the character development was gone.

  If any of you chanced to catch “The Road Less Traveled” in syndication, it was the butchered version you saw. The original thirty-six-minute cut was never aired, and so far as I know only two copies of it still exist on tape. Wes Craven has one, I understand. I have the other. I would show it to you if I could, but I can’t. All I can do is let you read my script.

  For what it’s worth, I can’t really quarrel with the network’s decision. The Twilight Zone was dying; CBS had to try something. The half-hour format was worth a shot. In hindsight, the series might have been better off if it had been a half-hour show right from the start. So I cannot fault the suits for making the change. I only wish they had waited a week, until after “The Road Less Traveled” had been aired.

  Sad to say, ratings showed no notable improvement, and CBS finally pulled
the plug halfway through the second season. A short time later, a third incarnation of The Twilight Zone arose from our ashes, and produced thirty cheap new half-hour shows which were bundled with our episodes to make a syndication package. TZ-3 inherited our unproduced scripts and filmed a few of them (most notably Alan Brennert’s fine adaptation of “The Cold Equations”), but otherwise had no connection to its predecessor. Or to me.

  The Twilight Zone was a unique show, the perfect series for someone like me. My first thought when it went off the air was that I was done with Hollywood. Hollywood was not done with me, however. The corpse of TZ-2 had scarcely cooled before I found myself writing a treatment for Max Headroom. A few months after that one of my TZ scripts got into the hands of Ron Koslow, the creator and Executive Producer of a new urban fantasy series called Beauty and the Beast that would be making its premiere in the fall of 1987. I was not convinced I wanted to do another show, but when my agents sent me a tape of Koslow’s Beauty and the Beast pilot, the quality of the writing, acting, and cinematography blew me away.

  I joined the staff of Beauty and the Beast in June of 1987, and spent three years with the series, rising from Executive Story Consultant to Supervising Producer. It was a very different sort of show than The Twilight Zone had been, but once again I found myself working with some terrific actors, writers, and directors. The show was twice nominated for an Emmy Award as Best Dramatic Series. I wrote and produced thirteen episodes, did uncredited rewrites on a score of others, and had a finger in everything from casting and budgeting to post-production, learning a great deal in the process. By the time Beauty and the Beast died its premature death, I had the experience and the credits to dream about creating and running a show of my own.