 
Introduction to the Bantam Paperback Patterns
by Rod Serling, 1957
About Writing for Television
There is probably no single “absolute” anyone can use as a yardstick to
describe the nature of the television writer, his background, his fortes, or the
nature of his advent into the realm of television writing—save for the simple
statement that there are no absolutes.
The TV writer is never trained to be a TV writer. There are no courses,
however specialized and applied, that will catapult him into the profession. And
it was especially true back in the twilight days of radio that coincided with
the primitive beginnings of television that the television playwrights
evolved—and were never born. In my case the decision to become a television
writer arose from no professional master plan. I was on the writing staff of a
radio station in the Midwest. Staff writing is a particularly dreamless
occupation characterized by assembly-line writing almost around the clock. It is
a highly variable occupation—everything from commercials and fifteen-second
public-service announcements to half-hour documentary dramas. In a writing
sense, it serves its purpose. It teaches a writer discipline, a time sense for
any kind of mass-media writing, and a technique. But it also dries up his
creativity, frustrates him, and tires him out.
It’s axiomatic that the beginning free-lance writer must have some sort of
economic base from which he operates. Usually it is a job with at least a
subsistence wage to give him rent money and three square meals a day while he
begins the treacherous and highly unsure first months of writing on his own. The
most desirable situation encompasses an undemanding job that draws little out of
the writer’s mind during the working day so that his nocturnal writing will be
fresh, inspired and undiverted. In my case this was a wish but never a reality.
I used to come home at seven o’clock in the evening, gulp down a dinner and
set up my antique portable typewriter on the kitchen table. The first hour would
then be spent closing all the mental gates and blacking out all the impressions
of a previous eight hours of writing. You have to have a pretty selective brain
for this sort of operation. There has to be the innate ability to singletrack
the creative processes. And after a year or so of this kind of problem, you have
rent receipts, fuel for the furnace and a record of regular eating; but you have
also denied yourself, as I did, a basic “must” for every writer. And this is
simple solitude—physical and mental.
The process of writing cannot be juggled with another occupation. The job of
creating cannot be compartmentalized with certain hours devoted to one kind of
creation and other hours set aside for still another. Writing is a demanding
profession and a selfish one. And because it is selfish and demanding, because
it is compulsive and exacting, I didn’t embrace it. I succumbed to it.
I can pinpoint the day and almost the hour that it happened for me. After two
years of double-shift writing, I had made approximately six sales to network
television programs. These weren’t bad scripts. There was usually a kind of
strength to them that showed in dialogue and a sense of character. But they were
stamped with the lack of professional polish. They showed in many ways that they
were done on a kitchen table during the eleventh and twelfth and thirteenth
hours of a working day. They were always sharpened, but never to their finest
points.
So, on a midwinter day, I gave in to free-lance writing. This was not the
overtly courageous plunge that some writers make. In my case I had just finished
a three-week assignment as a staff radio writer, planning a documentary series
designed to honor certain towns and cities in the listening area. (In regional
radio, adjoining localities are forever being honored. This is designed to make
for excellent public relations, but it is only on rare occasions that it makes
for even a modicum of good listening. In most cases, the towns I was assigned to
honor had little to distinguish them save antiquity. Any dramatization beyond
the fact that they existed physically, usually had one major industry, a
population and a founding date was more fabrication than documentation.)
I had just turned in a sample script to the program director that was
essentially above and beyond the call of duty, and well beyond the call of
truth. My script called for a narrator and a 30-piece live orchestra, and
contained the kind of prose that made Green Hills, Ohio, look like the Alamo!
When I was called into the P.D.’s office my script was lying face down on
his desk, like a thumb in a Roman arena. He leaned back in his swivel chair and
studied me pensively, as if searching for some velvet-glove language that could
be utilized to castigate me without breaking my spirit.
“Serling,” he said, “it’s this way. Your stuff’s too stilted. You
seem to be missing the common touch. We’re looking for grass roots here. We
want to be close to the people. We’re obliged to use the ‘folksy’
approach. In short, we want our people to get their teeth into the soil.”
As he was talking I knew exactly what he meant. The “folksy approach” did
not include a 30-piece orchestra, or prose out of Norman Corwin’s On a Note of Triumph. It needed only two elements: a hayseed M.C. who strummed a guitar and
said, “Shucks, friends”; and a girl yodeler whose falsetto could break a
beer mug at twenty paces. This was getting the teeth into the soil. And the
little thought journeyed through my brain that what these guys wanted was not a
writer but a plow!
During the next couple of hours two things occurred to form and then cement a
resolve of mine. The staff writer, in addition to writing, acts also as a kind
of roving “idea man” for several current and varied types of programs. One
of my duties was to supply “gimmicks” for an afternoon ladies’ show. That
afternoon I stopped by the studio to watch the tail end of one of its
performances. The master of ceremonies was a semi-literate, ex-tent revivalist
with curly hair and an absolutely devastating smile. He was winding up his show
with a three-minute sermon on the boys in Korea and how we should pray for them.
The ladies in the audience were totally captivated. There wasn’t a dry eye in
the studio. The program went off the air and the M.C., his eyes half closed,
walked softly out of the studio, past the sighs and fluttering eyelashes of the
good ladies who had come to see him and who now stared worshipfully and
respectfully up at him. He nodded to me and we both got on the elevator. It went
down one floor and a girl got off. The wavy head went up, the look of soulful
ecstasy left the broad and dimpled face. He winked at me, nudged my elbow and
said, “I wonder if she lays?”
(This same fat-faced, sanctimonious slob had told me earlier that he used to
travel with his father, who was also an itinerant evangelist. But at the time,
he said, his father did the preaching and he was the one who made the money: he
had the “Bible concession.”)
Two hours later I got my next assignment: to dream up an audition show for a
patent medicine currently the rage. It had about 12 per cent alcohol by volume
and, if the testimonials were to be believed, could cure everything from
arthritis to a fractured pelvis. I spent two minutes studying the agency’s
work sheet, which stated the general purpose of the program. I read as far as
the second paragraph: “This will be a program for the people. We’d like to
see a real grass-roots approach that is popular and close to the soil.” The
pattern of whatever future I had was very much in evidence. I was either going
to write dramatic shows for television, even at the risk of economics and common
sense, or I was going to succumb to the double-faced sanctimony of commercial
radio, rotating words as if they were crops, and utilizing one of the approaches
so characteristic to radio-writing and thinking downward at the lowest possible
common denominator of an audience. That afternoon I quit the radio station.
I sat that night with my wife, Carol, at a Howard Johnson’s restaurant and
after a few false starts—”You know, honey, a man could make a lot of money
free-lancing”—I talked out my hope. Free-lance writing would no longer be a
kind of errant hope to augment our economy, to be done around the midnight hour
on a kitchen table. Freelance writing would now be our bread, our butter, and
the now-or-never of our whole existence. My wife was twenty-one, three months
pregnant, and a most adept reader of the score. She knew all about free-lance
writing. She’d lived with it with me through college and the two years
afterward. She knew that in my best year I had netted exactly $790. She was well
aware that it was a hit-or-miss profession where the lush days are followed by
the lean. She knew it was seasonal, and there was no definition of the seasons.
She knew that it was a frustrating, insecure, bleeding business at best, and the
guy she was married to could get his pride, his composure and his confidence
eaten away with the acid of disappointment. All this she knew sitting at a table
in Howard Johnson’s in 1951. And as it turned out, this was a scene with no
dialogue at all. All she did was to take my hand. Then she winked at me and
picked up a menu and studied it. And at that given moment, the vision of
medicine bottles, girl yodelers, and guitar-strumming M.C.s faded away into
happy obscurity. For lush or lean, good or bad, Sardi’s or malnutrition, I’d
launched a career. I’ll grant you the perhaps inordinate amount of sentiment
attached to all the above, but if this were a novel, patent medicines, Howard
Johnson, and my wife, Carol, would all be part of an obligatory first chapter.
This was the nature of television in 1951. The medium had progressed somewhat
past the primitive stage. There was still a sense of bewilderment on the part of
everyone connected with the shows. And it was still more the rule than the
exception to find the opening camera shot of almost every television play
trained on the behind of one of the cameramen. But by this time there were six
half-hour “live” shows that came out of New York, and two or three one-hour
shows. On the Coast there were a dozen or more filmed half-hour anthologies. The
television writer’s claim to the title “playwright” had been made, but
as yet was not universally accepted. The TV play, once called by Paddy Chayefsky
“the most perishable item known to man,” enjoyed no longevity through the
good offices of the legitimate stage and the motion pictures. The motion-picture
industry looked down at its newborn cousin somewhat as the president of a
gourmet club might examine an aborigine gnawing a slab of raw meat. The movie
people had no way of knowing at the time that this bumbling, inexpert baby
medium would one day compete with them and come dangerously close to destroying
them. For at that time the television play went on and off the air with few
cheers and with no one to mourn its passing. The video diet was a lean mixture
of wrestling and occasional football. These were the days of the 10-inch screen,
the 1931 movies, and Gorgeous George. The television dramas extant were still in
the process of feeling their way around, trying to find some kind of level of
performance, some reason for being, and some set of techniques. At the time
there existed no species referred to exclusively as “television writers.”
There were radio writers who were extending themselves a bit, realists who knew
that the golden days of radio drama were dimming into twilight. There were
screen writers doing television films as a stop-gap between picture assignments.
There were also some embryonic playwrights who used the new medium as a kind of
finger exercise for what they hoped would turn into legitimate writing later on.
But neither the industry nor the public was prone to make any association
between writing of real quality and the sort of thing done for television.
My first television script had been sold in early 1950 to an NBC film series
on the Coast called Stars Over Hollywood. It was brave and adventuresome. Beyond
this, the production and conception of the program were symptomatic of
absolutely the worst features of Class-B moviemaking. The plots were an ABC
mishmash, with the depth and levels of an adobe hut. The performances were
rarely ever able to overcome the scripts. The piece I sold them was called “Grady
Everett for the People.” It starred Burt Freed, who turned in a pretty fair
performance, considering everything. I don’t recall too clearly the essence of
the story or the way it was done, but I have a vivid recollection of the payment
involved. It was exactly $100 for all television rights. I never met anyone
connected with this production, nor did I set foot in the studio. But as of this
writing it has been on at least twenty-four times at odd hours and on odd
channels. I will claim immodestly that it surpassed wrestling; beyond that, I’ll
make no value judgment whatsoever.
The singularly distinguishing feature of television drama in those early days
was a paucity of payment, sets, and theme. And to go along with this was a bleak
desert which represented the area of identity of the television writer. He was
practically anonymous; he had an ill-defined respect for his talents and no
protection at all for his work. He had few prerogatives in terms of its
production and only the barest of recognition for his contribution.
The Kraft Television Theatre, the oldest of the one-hour dramatic
shows, wouldn’t permit a writer at rehearsal until the day of the show. His
presence at that late hour was probably a guarantee against intrusion. For by
then the lines had already been changed, the interpretations made, the blocking
and camera arranged. The writer could protest, but only as a gesture. The show
was a fait accompli prior to his arrival. In the kindred areas of rewriting,
casting, music, et al, the writer had even less to say. I cite the Kraft Theatre
as an example not to single it out for a necessarily unique mistreatment of
authors but because it was one of the few dramatic programs existent at the
time. It aimed for quality and often achieved it. This was the show that did
things like Moliere’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself; Ibsen’s A Doll’s House;
Galsworthy’s Justice and Loyalties. It also produced plays like Valley Forge, Berkeley Square, Comedy of Errors and Macbeth—and some of these shows were
produced as early as 1947. The reader can pretty much gather what the policies
of the lesser programs were with regard to their conception and treatment of
the men and women who wrote the material.
These first four and five years of television were the cradle days of a baby
whose birth may not have been accidental but whose process of maturing was far
from being planned. But thanks to programs like Kraft and some others,
television was expanding its technique and coverage. And along with it came an
expansion in quality. Besides Kraft there was Studio One. Tony Miner, a pioneer
without coonskin, was producing the plays on Studio One, whose expanse was
becoming as much horizontal as vertical. One of his productions took place on a
submarine. He used actual water and a mock-up submarine, and he did it on a
nickel-and-dime budget that today wouldn’t pay for a cast on a half-hour show.
It evolved as a striking and powerfully realistic illusion, and it pointed the
way to a new horizon in live television.
Celanese Theatre went on the air and did things like Maxwell Anderson’s
Winterset, and it did them well and effectively. Celanese was directed by a man
named Alex Segal, who became one of the early “names” in television. He was
later to direct some television plays by Rod Serling, who at the time of Alex’s
arrival on the television scene was still writing prayer messages for an ex-tent
revivalist in Ohio. But at this moment in the evolution of television drama
there were even a few intellectual diehards who began to see the potential of
it, and began to realize that a television play could come close. to the
legitimate theater, and even surpass it sometimes in terms of flexibility. Along
with television’s expansion and progress came the birth of a new school of
television actors and actresses, men and women associated with the medium and
known because of it. Like Hollywood and Broadway before it, television began to
produce its own stars, and also like Hollywood and Broadway the writer was the
last of the company to achieve an identity. To his everlasting credit, he did it
on his own. The networks financed no campaign to make Chayefsky a known and
associable quantity. Several million viewers began to make that association on
their own. Plays by Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, Bob Arthur, David Swift and
David Shaw were stamped with that particular quality that forced recognition.
The programs and networks helped, of course. The medium was improving to a point
where it allowed them to help. They began to supply the financial and technical
aid to enlarge the scope of the television drama. Now a writer could conceive of
a story that played on more than two sets with more than four actors. He could
write with an eye toward the fluidity of movement that came with three cameras.
His sets and costumes were no longer slapped together as incidental
accouterments to a one-shot performance. They were given thought, preparation
and time.
But the major advance in the television play was a thematic one. The medium
began to show a cognizance of its own particular fortes. It had the immediacy of
the living theater, some of the flexibility of the motion picture, and the
coverage of radio. It utilized all three in developing and improving what was
actually a new art form. As indicated previously by the plays on Kraft, Studio
One and Celanese Theatre, one could see that the television play was beginning
to show depth and a preoccupation with character. Its plots and its people were
becoming meaningful. Its stories had something to say. There was a flavor to it
well beyond the early Hollywood half-hour film which shoved a product out that
was obviously molded at an early age and became moldy at a late one. This
product was sprinkled with a kiss, a gunshot, a dab of sex, a final curtain
clinch, and it was called drama. Parenthetically it might be stated here that
Hollywood did little to help in the evolution and improvement of television as a
medium, at least in terms of drama. What accolades are deserved here should go
to Chicago and New York.
In terms of technique, the “close-up” that had served as such a boon to
the motion pictures was further refined and used to even greater advantage in
television. The key to TV drama was intimacy, and the facial study on a small
screen carried with it a meaning and power far beyond its usage in the motion
pictures. I can’t forget, for example, the endearing passage in Paddy
Chayefsky’s Marty between Marty and the girl in the little all-night beanery.
This scene was a close-up of the two through the entire playing. And the
wonderfully fabulous thing of two lonely people finding each other was played on
the two faces. I am also reminded of one of my own things, a totally different
piece from Marty but one which utilized the same kind of television technique
that was so uniquely television. This was The Strike, produced on Studio One in
June 1954. There was a moment in the play when Major Gaylord (extremely well
played by James Daly) was recounting an experience during World War II when he
was obliged to fire on an American soldier in the dead of night on a Pacific
island. The camera stayed tight on his face for almost three solid minutes, and
we had a moving, poignant and almost heart-rending picture of the fatigue and
fear that go hand in hand in the province of wartime combat.
The physical and the fates conspired to force the maturing of the television
drama. It was no longer a novelty; it had become a fixture. As such it competed
with every other kind of entertainment; consequently it was forced to become
better, to become different, and to aim higher. It was a medium that in a
one-hour time period could play to an audience greater than a Broadway play
reached in one solid year of SRO crowds. With this kind of potential and with
this kind of impetus, however young, however groping, television was something
to b® reckoned with.
Television today remains a study in imperfection. Some of its basic
weaknesses and mediocrity are still with us. There is still wrestling, soap
opera, overlong commercials and some incredibly bad writing. There is really no
defense for any of this, but there is an explanation. You need only look at a
calendar to remember that only seven or eight years have gone by and the medium
remains a young one and a groping one. There still remain new techniques to
learn, new fields to examine and a myriad set of roadblocks to progress that
still have to be breached.
But there is still time and there are still ways. Radio was around for
twenty-odd years before it really found its niche and ultimately wrote out a
finis to its potential. Television hasn’t exhausted its potential or
altogether found its niche. And in the area of drama it has already far
surpassed that of its sister medium.
Like any mass medium, it might still die from internal strangulation. But for
those of us who professionally cast our lot with it in its early days, we haven’t
yet given up. For us the heartening thing is that there are still things to
strive for.
A Few Recollections
A writer—at least this writer—measures his career not so much
in terms of years as in individual moments. They are the good moments: the big
sale, the well-received show, the award at the end of the year. The television
playwright must savor his success and his good moments very hurriedly, because
they’re temporal at best. But the bad moments—his failures, the script rejections,
the incisively bad reviews—cling to him with much more tenacity and for longer
periods than the moderate successes.
Between late 1951 and 1954 I lived in Ohio, commuting back and forth to New
York to take part in story conferences and the rehearsals of my shows. This was
expensive and time-consuming, but was a concession to my own peculiar hesitancy
about all things big, massive and imposing. New York television and its people
were such an entity. For some totally unexplainable reason, every time I walked
into a network or agency office I had the strange and persistent feeling that I
was wearing overalls and Li’l Abner shoes.
I remember one incident during those early days when I had flown into New
York to discuss a rewrite on a script called You Be the Bad Guy, which starred
Macdonald Carey. The script editor, Dick McDonagh, asked if I’d like to meet
the star of the show. I was ushered into a small office where the cast was
assembled for the reading, and there was introduced to Mr. Carey, who turned out
to be an extremely pleasant, affable guy, who stood up and shook my hand and
complimented me on the script. I remember standing in the center of the room
wondering what the hell I could do next, and deciding that I had outworn my
welcome and my purpose and should at this time beat a retreat. I looked busily
and professionally at my watch, nodded tersely to all assembled, mumbled
something about it being a pleasure to see them all but that I had to catch a
plane going west, and then turned and crashed into the wall, missing the door by
two feet. Then, in backing out of the room, I ran into an oncoming secretary and
dropped my briefcase, exposing not only scripts and writing material, but a
couple of pairs of socks, some handkerchiefs and some underwear. (I traveled
light in those days.) My exit from the J. Walter Thompson offices that day could
not have been more pointed and obvious had it been staged by Max Leibman. But as
a postscript to the story, I remember Dick McDonagh gripping my hand before I
left the building and saying, “Look, little friend, these people don’t give
a good healthy damn what you carry in your briefcase, or how you leave a room.
All they care about is what’s in there!” He pointed at my head. Then he
slapped me on the back and wished me well, and I headed back to the airport and
Ohio.
On a writer’s way up, he meets and does business with a lot of people. And
in some rare cases there’s a person along the way who happens to be around
just when he’s needed—perhaps just a moment of professional advice, a brief
compliment to boost the ego when it’s been bent, cracked and pushed into the
ground, a pat on the back and eight words of encouragement, when a writer’s
self-doubts are so persistent, so deep-rooted and so destructive that they
affect his writing. Dick McDonagh gave me many moments and several words of
encouragement and enough pats on the back to keep me propelled forward. He once
told me that there might be a day when he’d be reading some of my plays in a
book anthology. He may know very well by now how prophetic were his words. But I
wonder if he also realizes how instrumental he was in having it happen.
The writer in any field, and particularly the television writer,
runs into “dry periods”—weeks or months when it seems that everything he writes
goes the rounds and ultimately gets nowhere. This is not only a bad moment but
an endless one. I remember a five-month period late in 1952 when my diet consisted
chiefly of black coffee and fingernails. I’d written six half-hour television
plays and each one had been rejected at least five times. What this kind of
thing does to a family budget is obvious; and what it does to the personality
of the writer is even worse. The typewriter on my desk was no longer a helpmate;
it took on the guise of an opponent. The keys seemed stiff and unyielding. The
carriage seemed bulky and sluggish, and the wastepaper basket would get crammed
by the hour with discarded pages—a testimonial to my unsureness as to what
to write and how to write it. Toward the end of this, I got a letter from Mr.
Worthington Miner. I’ve mentioned Tony Miner earlier. Then as now he was a major-league,
top-drawer television producer. And to get a letter from him, particularly a
letter asking to see scripts, was like a third string pony-league pitcher getting
a telegram from John McGraw telling him to come up and pitch for the Giants.
I flew into New York to see him, my briefcase bulging with manuscripts. ( There
wasn’t even room for socks.) Tony read them, and during our second meeting informed
me that he’d like to buy at least six of them. He was putting together a new
show to be sponsored by an auto company, and my work impressed him. The feeling
I got in that given moment was something akin to what a person feels when he
is notified that he’s just won the Irish sweepstakes. The knees begin to give
out and there’s a roar that begins some place down deep in the gut and starts
to travel toward the throat. Fifteen minutes later I was on the telephone calling
my wife and guzzling a Scotch on the rocks I ordered from room service (tipping
the bellboy a whole buck), and adding up in my mind know very well by now how
prophetic were his words, how much are six times six or seven hundred dollars.
One week later, back in Ohio, I got another letter from Tony Miner apologizing
and explaining that the show he was putting together had been shunted off to
another agency and he would not be producing it. The guy who had won the Irish
sweepstakes couldn’t find his ticket stub. It was that kind of feeling. For
some perverse reason I saved Tony’s second letter; my wife put it into a scrapbook.
And sometimes I take a look at it as a piece of memorabilia to document a bad
moment that on the scale of a career’s ups and downs represents the bottom of
the barrel. A writer’s career is studded with the near sales, the close hits,
the almost-but-never-wases. And afterward, when he becomes accustomed to eating
a little higher off the hawg, the bad moments get remembered. And no matter
what you eat, it tastes like pheasant under glass.
Besides the good and bad moments in a career of writing, there is also an
indefinable hard-to-peg turning point, a crossing of the Rubicon when suddenly
you find your name somewhat known in the agencies and on the networks. You
announce it at the reception desk and the girl nods knowingly and doesn’t ask
you to repeat it or query you as to its spelling. Exactly when this happens and
how, you’re never quite sure. But it does happen. Afterward the process of
writing is never any simpler, the ideas are never easier to come by, and your
craft and technique don’t seem appreciably altered. But there is a difference,
as if the long grind upward levels out a little bit and the going becomes a
little easier. In my case it happened because of a single show that emanated
live out of New York City. This was the Lux Video Theatre.
Over a two-year period they bought twelve of my shows and produced eleven of
them. Since that time, Lux has gone the way of so many dramatic shows. They
moved West, went into an hour form, and in this case began to use old movie
properties instead of originals. But in its New York half-hour days, the Lux
Video Theatre proved itself symptomatic of the basic difference between what was
Hollywood television and what was then New York City television. It was a show
that consistently aimed high. Its whole conception in terms of dialogue and
production was adult, never hackneyed, and almost always honest. It touched upon
themes like dope and marital infidelity. It did things like adaptations of short
stories by Faulkner and Benet; it encouraged the submission of original scripts
by any writer who knew how to write, regardless of what his credits were. The
definitive characteristic of this show was that it never got rutted into a “type”
program. It was never a till-death-us-do-part marriage between the policy of the
program and the type of story and ending. The most meaningful and probably the
most valuable thing that I can say about the Lux Video Theatre is applicable to
all of television. On the basis of individual shows, it was as often
unsuccessful as it was successful. But it always tried. And though its sights
were sometimes aimed higher than its capabilities, it was rarely dull. If this
could be said of the entire medium, flags could be raised on all the antennae.
The Problem Areas
Defensiveness in a television writer is a kind of occupational disease. His
newfound stature has been somewhat therapeutic in combating it, but it remains
in varying degrees. A writer is still thought of in some circles as a hack,
plain and simple. His work is still regarded by some as merely an appendage to a
sales message. And the medium he writes for is still maligned as being
principally a display case and not an art form.
The TV writer falls prey to some of his criticism because he deserves it. A
sizable bulk of television writing still must be dismissed as inconsequential or
simply bad stuff, but there also exist reasons for this. And if they don’t
stack up as reasons all the time, they are at least in a sense explanatory of a
condition. The mass-medium writer has two major problem areas in which he must
write. These two areas represent roughly the nature of the medium and the writer’s
identity.
There is probably no single “absolute” anyone can use as a yardstick
to describe the nature of the television writer, his background, his fortes,
or the nature of his advent into the realm of television writing—save for the
simple statement that there are no absolutes.
The Nature of the Medium
Built into television drama are innate and homegrown problems that do not
exist in any other art form. Television, while unique in its potentials, is
further unique in its limitations. In playwriting this is particularly true. For
example, in no other writing form is the author so fettered by the clock. The
half-hour program will sustain a story for only 23-odd minutes. The hour program
calls for a 48- to 50-minute play. It is unheard of that a legitimate
playwright must write within so rigid and inflexible a time frame. But the TV
writer must. It is further arbitrary that his play must “break” twice in a
half-hour show and three times in an hour show to allow time for the commercial
messages. Obviously, there are some plays that will not in any circumstances
lend themselves to such an artificial stoppage. The “break” will hurt the
flow, the continuity and the build, but the “break” must come. And what do
you do about it?
This time problem extends over into another area: production.
The average hour television show rehearses for eight or nine days. This means
a little over a week allotted to reading, staging, blocking, line learning,
camera, dress rehearsals and, finally, production. Contrast this with a Broadway
play that rehearses on an average of one month to stage a production that runs
only twice as long as its television counterpart.
Very recently, when Playhouse 90 began telecasting on a weekly
basis with a 90-minute play each week, it was thought that here at last was
the time frame long and flexible enough to aid the writer in handling plot,
character and pacing. I for one gratefully accepted the assignments for the
first two plays of this new series, thinking, as did most others, that with
about 70 minutes allotted the play, it would be moving out of an igloo into
a mansion. But once again television’s own peculiar limitations cropped up and,
instead of aiding the playwright, the new time frame within this program did
nothing but hurt him. For instead of a regular three-act arrangement, Playhouse
90 took a host of sponsors, each demanding at least two commercials. The result
was that during the ninety minutes the show had to be divided into twelve- and
thirteen-minute segments, each separated by a commercial, so that the overall
effect was that of a chopped-up collection of short dramatic segments torn apart
and intruded upon by constantly recurring commercials. Scenes had to be automatically
“curtained” at a high emotional pitch to accommodate the stoppage of action,
the commercial, and then pick up the thread of story line. It is obvious that
a succession of phony curtains or emotional high points will eventually dilute
the effect of any play. An audience can get used to and almost oblivious to
bomb blasts if they occur often enough.
The physical limitations of the television drama are part and parcel of the
innate problems of the writer. Four or five basic sets represent the maximum
stretching of both facilities and imagination. I might parenthetically state
here that television’s “intimacy,” so often its strength, is an outgrowth
of this weakness. We had to be intimate. We didn’t have room to be anything
else. In New York, the Mecca of live television drama, the set problems are the
greatest and show the least possibility of improvement. Most of the shows are
berthed in old movie houses, buildings that are the victims of the young medium
which now utilizes them. They are segmentized, overextended, and asked to serve
in a capacity they were not designed for. This lack of space is often reflected
in the techniques of television playwriting. The author must often probe
vertically because there just aren’t enough inches to let him spread out
horizontally.
But while time and space present hurdles, the basic, the most important
limitation of the television dramatist is not totally physical. In a sense it is
more philosophical. And this happens to be the simple and fundamental fact that
our economy is geared to advertising. For good or for bad, the television play
must ride piggy-back on the commercial product. It serves primarily as the sugar
to sweeten the usually unpalatable sales pitch. It’s the excuse to wangle and
hold an audience. The play is forced to become a kissing cousin to an entity
totally foreign to it. The audience, during a one-hour viewing of a drama, is
forcibly deprived of that drama and in its place is exposed to three minutes of
Madison Avenue dynamics. The audience must then make its own mental and
emotional realignment to “get back with” the sole object of its intentions.
That it can do it at all is a tribute to mass intelligence and selectivity.
I don’t really believe there exists a “good” form of commercial.
There are some that are less distasteful than others, but at best they’re intrusive.
And even in the most absolutely palatable form, they thrust a cleaver into the
overall effect of a television drama—and they do it three times during its
all too brief playing, and even more during the 90-minute shows.
I make reference to this by way of pointing out a basic weakness of the
medium. I do not presume to suggest any antidotes or alternatives. At the moment
none seems possible. A sponsor invests heavily in television as an organ of
dissemination. That organ would wither away without his capital and without his
support. In many ways he hinders its development and its refinement, but by his
presence he guarantees its survival.
Still, I don’t think it is possible to generalize about the sponsor or the
agency or the networks themselves. They vary as to the intensity of their
dogmas, the legitimacy of their concerns, and the extent of their interference
in a given television play. But, at their very worst, their interference is an
often stultifying, often destructive and inexcusable by-product of our
mass-media system. It extends into an area of dramatic creation that should by
rights lie well outside their bailiwick and well beyond their scope of
prerogative. I think it is a basic truth that no dramatic art form should be
dictated and controlled by men whose training, interest and instincts are cut of
entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer
goods, not an art form.
A few years ago on a program called Appointment with Adventure
I was called in to make alterations in some of the dialogue. I was asked not
to use the words “American” or “lucky.” Instead, the words were to be changed
to “United States” and “fortunate.” The explanation was that this particular
program was sponsored by a cigarette company and that “American” and “lucky”
connoted a rival brand of cigarettes. After establishing beyond any doubt that
my leg wasn’t being pulled and that this wasn’t some cheap, overstated gag,
I did the only thing a writer can do in television in the way of a protest.
I asked that my name be withheld from the script. It was not that the alteration
of the language in this case was of particular consequence or to any large degree
changed the story. But in the matter of principle I felt that this was ludicrous
interference, and I didn’t want to be part of it. I’ll never forget the man
from Talent Associates, the outfit that produced the show, explaining to me
that this was not the happiest state of affairs, but that writers, as well as
any creative people connected with the show, should keep in mind that it’s altogether
proper for a sponsor to utilize certain prerogatives since he’s paying for what
goes on. Extending this kind of logic, we might assume that it is altogether
proper for a beer-company executive to have a hand in managing a baseball club
whose games are televised under his sponsorship.
Exactly where is the line of demarcation between the play and the commercial?
No one seems to know. Ideally, the sponsor should have no more right of
interference than an advertiser in a magazine. Theoretically, at least, this
advertiser has no say over the policy of the magazine he buys space in, nor
should he have even to a minute degree. But in television today, the writer is
hamstrung and closeted in by myriad of taboos, regulations and imposed dogma
that dictate to him what he can write about and what he can’t.
In the television seasons of 1952 and 1953, almost every television
play I sold to the major networks was “non-controversial.” This is to say that
in terms of their themes they were socially inoffensive, and dealt with no current
human problem in which battle lines might be drawn.
After the production of Patterns, when my things were considerably easier to
sell, in a mad and impetuous moment I had the temerity to tackle a theme that
was definitely two-sided in its implications. I think this story is worth
repeating.
The script was called Noon on Doomsday. It was produced by the
Theatre Guild on the United States Steel Hour in April 1956. The play, in its
original form, followed very closely the Till case in Mississippi, where a young
Negro boy was kidnapped and killed by two white men who went to trial and were
exonerated on both counts. The righteous and continuing wrath of the Northern
press opened no eyes and touched no consciences in the little town in Mississippi
where the two men were tried. It was like a cold wind that made them huddle
together for protection against an outside force. which they could equate with
an adversary. It struck me at the time that the entire trial and its aftermath
was simply “They’re bastards, but they’re our bastards.” So I wrote a play in
which my antagonist was not just a killer but a regional idea. It was the story
of a little town banding together to protect its own against outside condemnation.
At no point in the conception of my story was there a black-white issue. The
victim was an old Jew who ran a pawnshop. The killer was a neurotic malcontent
who lashed out at something or someone who might be materially and physically
the scapegoat for his own unhappy, purposeless, miserable existence. Philosophically
I felt that I was on sound ground. I felt that I was dealing with a sociological
phenomenon—the need of human beings to have a scapegoat to rationalize their
own shortcomings.
Noon on Doomsday finally went on the air several months later, but in a
welter of publicity that came from some fifteen thousand letters and wires from
White Citizens Councils and the like protesting the production of the play. In
news stories, the play had been erroneously described as “The story of the
Till case.” At one point earlier, during an interview on the Coast, I told a
reporter from one of the news services the story of Noon on Doomsday. He said,
“Sounds like the Till case.” I shrugged it off, answering, “If the shoe
fits . . .” This is all it took. From that moment on Noon on Doomsday was the
dramatization of the Till case. And no matter how the Theatre Guild or the
agency representing U.S. Steel denied it, the impression persisted.
The offices of the Theatre Guild, on West 53rd Street in New York City, took
on all the aspects of a football field ten seconds after the final whistle blew.
Crowds converged, and if there had been a goal post to tear down, they would
have done so. The White Citizens Councils threatened boycott and the agency
people somberly told me that this was no idle threat. They had accomplished
effective boycotts down South against the Ford Motor Company and the makers of
Philip Morris cigarettes.
In the former case, it seemed that Negro workers had been permitted to work
on assembly lines alongside whites; and in the case of Philip Morris, there had
been a beauty contest in Chicago where one of the winners was a Negro girl. This
was all it took for a wrathful wind to come up from the South. I asked the
agency men at the time how the problem of boycott applied to the United States
Steel Company. Did this mean that from then on that all construction from
Tennessee on down would be done with aluminum? Their answer was that the concern
of the sponsor was not so much an economic boycott as the resultant strain in
public relations.
These, therefore, were the fears, and this was the antidote. The script was
gone over with a fine-tooth comb by thirty different people, and I attended at
least two meetings a day for over a week, taking down notes as to what had to be
changed. My victim could no longer be anyone as specific as an old Jew. He was
to be called an unnamed foreigner, and even this was a concession to me, since
the agency felt that there should not really be a suggestion of a minority at
all; this was too close to the Till case. Further, it was suggested that the
killer in the case was not a psychopathic malcontent—just a good, decent,
American boy momentarily gone wrong. It was a Pier 6 brawl to stop this
alteration of character. The script was then dissected and combed so that every
word of dialogue that might remotely be “Southern” in context could be
deleted or altered. At no point in the script could the word “lynch” be
used. No social event, institution, way of life or simple diet could be
indicated that might be “Southern” in origin. Later, on the set, bottles of
Coca—Cola were taken away because this, according to the agency, had “Southern”
connotations. Previously, I had always assumed that Coke was pretty much a
national drink and could never, in the farthest stretch of the imagination, be
equated with hominy grits and black-eyed peas, but I was shown the error of my
thinking. And to carry the above step even further, a geographical change was
made in the script so that instead of being a little town of undesignated
location, it was shoved as far north as possible, making it a New England town.
It is conceivable that the agency would have placed the action at the North Pole
if it hadn’t been for the necessary inclusion of Eskimos, which would prove
still another minority problem. For it to open in New England, with the
customary spires of a white church in the background of the set—so typically
Yankee and Puritan—was somewhat ludicrous to behold. But this was to be a total
surrender, and there would be no concessions made even to logic.
Noon on Doomsday was, in the final analysis, an overwritten play. It was
often tract-like, much too direct, and had a habit of overstatement. What
destroyed it as a piece of writing was the fact that when it was ultimately
produced, its thesis had been diluted, and my characters had mounted a soap box
to shout something that had become too vague to warrant any shouting. The
incident of violence that the play talked about should have been representative
and symbolic of a social evil. It should have been treated as if a specific
incident was symptomatic of a more general problem. But by the time Noon. on
Doomsday went in front of a camera, the only problem recognizable was that of a
TV writer having to succumb to the ritual of track covering so characteristic of
the medium he wrote for. It was the impossible task of allegorically striking
out at a social evil with a feather duster because the available symbols for
allegory were too few, too far between, and too totally dissimilar to what was
actually needed. In a way it was like trying to tell a Jewish joke with a cast
of characters consisting of two leprechauns. This track covering takes many
forms in television. It is rarely if ever successful, and carries with it an
innate transparency that shows it up for what it is.
When Reginald Rose, in an exceptionally fine play, Thunder on
Sycamore Street, took an uncompromising swipe at a brand of lunacy in our country
that recognizes equality as applying only to those whose roots are in the third-deck
planking of the Mayflower, he had to couch his theme in a language acceptable
on Madison Avenue. It was the story of a family in a residential street being
bullied and pushed around by their neighbors because the guy happened to be
an ex-convict. The story was originally written about a Negro family. The central
conflict in every line of dialogue pointed to the Negro-White problem and the
altogether basic premise that sooner or later human beings are going to have
to live together side by side. Mr. Rose’s enforced track covering was simply
exchanging an ex-convict for a Negro. And this is a process a TV writer has
to learn and to perfect. He must hunt and peck until he finds a more acceptable
minority than the Negro—often the American Indian. This is, of course, somewhat
limiting—since it is a difficult minority problem to play in New England, but
television sponsors and agencies are prone to accept slight inconsistencies
when it comes to skirting a sticky issue. I am afraid that eventually we TV
writers may run out of substitutes. I suppose, then, because we are pretty inventive
and imaginative guys, the standard minority scapegoat will turn out to be a
robot, and this will step on no toes whatsoever. But in the meantime, a medium
best suited to illumine and dramatize the issues of the times has its product
pressed into a mold, painted lily-white, and has its dramatic teeth yanked one
by one.
Sometimes television is faced with a problem where it is physically
impossible to substitute an idea. Last year I was faced with such a problem when
I wrote a script called The Arena, which was done on Studio One. In this case, I
was dealing with a political story where much of the physical action took place
on the floor of the United States Senate. One of the edicts that comes down from
the Mount Sinai of Advertisers Row is that at no time in a political drama must
a speech or character be equated with an existing political party or current
political problems. Some of these problems, however, are now so hoary with age
and so meaningless in modern, context that they are stamped as acceptable.
Slavery, for example, can now be talked about without blushing. Suffrage is
another issue that need make no one wince. The treatment of the lunatic in
chains and dungeons can no longer be considered controversial. But The Arena
took place in 1956, and no juggling of events can alter this fact. So, on the
floor of the United States Senate (at least on Studio One), I was not permitted
to have my Senators discuss any current or pressing problem. To talk of tariff
was to align oneself with the Republicans; to talk of labor was to suggest
control by the Democrats. To say a single thing germane to the current political
scene was absolutely prohibited. So, on television in April of 1956, several
million viewers got a definitive picture of television’s concept of politics
and the way the government is run. They were treated to an incredible display on
the floor of the United States Senate of groups of Senators shouting,
gesticulating and talking in hieroglyphics about make-believe issues, using
invented terminology, in a kind of prolonged, unbelievable double-talk. There
were long and impassioned defenses of the principles involved in Bill H. R.
107803906, but the salient features of the bill were conveniently shoved off
into a corner of a side-of-the-mouth sotto voce, so that at no time could an
audience have any idea what they were about. In retrospect, I probably would
have had a much more adult play had I made it science fiction, put it in the
year 2057, and peopled the Senate with robots. This would probably have been
more reasonable and no less dramatically incisive.
The problem of censorship in television is not only a writer’s problem.
What narrows his frame of reference must of necessity narrow the area of
television entertainment available to the audience. When the television drama is
forced to go around Robin Hood’s barn tying itself into verbal knots to evolve
as stainlessly nonpartisan, whatever nonsense comes out as the replacement is
the nonsense that an audience must live with on its television sets. Perhaps if
some thoughtful people would write to sponsors, pleading for an adult airing of
issues on a dramatic program, to counteract those cranks who hoist up the Stars
and Bars whenever a play suggests a racial controversy, the sponsor or agency
would realize that not to attack a controversial theme might be just as
destructive as attacking it.
Television critics have tried to champion the writers’ cause in the area of
censorship but have done so obliquely and as a result, in many ways, have hurt
instead of helped. For when these St. Georges of the Press tilt their lances at
what is humdrum, ineffectual and hackneyed, too often the victim they single out
is the writer or the program’s producers. They slay a dragon, but it’s often
the wrong one. The people who put on a television play, from the writer on
through the entire staff, are not the people to make bleed for what is an innate
weakness in the treatment or theme. Let the critics go on record as condemning
the whole pressure system of sponsors, agencies and networks. These are the only
ones who can appreciably alter the conception of TV drama and widen its horizons
of theme selectivity.
Television drama is probably at no crossroads at the moment. It can go on and
on, improving or not improving, and still remain a pretty important fixture on
the American scene. But what can happen is that it can, in a sense, commit
itself to its own creative rut by not fighting for something a little bit
better, and not looking for something that is new. Radio drama, after 20-odd
years as king, left no lasting imprint of any importance.
It left no legacy of particularly memorable moments in drama. It produced
very few talents who could be remembered uniquely for their contributions to
radio drama. From the point of view of the writer, there were no Chayefskys and
no Roses and few anybody ekes. Beyond Norman Corwin, Arch Oboler, and perhaps
Wyllis Cooper, go look for a known name among radio writers. I don’t think
there are any, at least that the public knows about. Radio, in terms of its
drama, dug its own grave. It had aimed downward, had become cheap and
unbelievable, and had willingly settled for second best. It is quite conceivable
that the television drama may well get stuck tighter and tighter into a mold of
mediocrity. Creative people, particularly writers, can only be censored, sat on,
and limited so much and for so long. After a time, fighting back seems
relatively unimportant. The sponsor may continue to sell his soap just as the
radio soap operas did for him, but by then the television drama will be a dull,
sloppy old man who sits contemplating his widening paunch without interest,
without energy, and with no horizon left at all.
Identity
No matter what a man or a woman does for a living, it is part of the human
mechanism to expect and need recognition of some sort. Beyond the security and
the pay check is the palpable hunger of a person to have an identity of his own.
This need, in a writer particularly, is probably mare pronounced and yet less
satisfied than the like needs of any other creative group in the arts. The
anonymity of the writer in early television was simply a carry-over of a policy
established in the motion pictures. The motion-picture writer was probably the
best paid and least known person in the industry. The television writer, in the
beginning, had not even the benefit of the pay to rationalize the fact that his
name would never be associable with his product. I’ve already mentioned that
in the early days of my writing the writer’s credit attached to any dramatic
show usually crossed the screen in a fraction of a second, propelled both by the
urgency of the brief time allotted and the unstated, though generally accepted,
belief in the relative unimportance of the person who wrote the script. Writers,
like most human beings, are adaptable creatures. They can learn to accept
subordination without growing fond of it. No writer can forever stand in the
wings and watch other people take the curtain calls while his own contributions
get lost in the shuffle.
I remember, at the Awards dinner of the Academy of Television Arts and
Sciences in 1955, I had been nominated in the category of Best Teleplay Writing
for my play on Kraft, Patterns. I was resigned to the fact that the announcement
of the award came late in the program after awards for Best Scenic Designer,
Best Live Photography, and Floor Director Who Tripped Over the Cables the Most
Times. Further, I felt no misery that the Writing category had been allotted the
tail end of the show, past its national telecast, so that the proceedings had
gone off the air prior to its announcement. For even at this stage of the
presentations it was a thrill to hear my name called off, to rise, walk onto the
platform to accept the beautiful and elusive Emmy. For no matter how you slice
it, the little bronze statuette is recognition. It’s identity. It’s a reward
and a compliment and a culmination that comes after a lot of years of banging a
typewriter. But after the applause had died down, I remained there on the stage
with a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, realizing, as did everyone else,
that there was no one on the stage to give me the award. Somewhere along the
line, plans had got fouled up, and Ed Sullivan, who was to hand me the Emmy, had
been called off the stage by a photographer. So there I stood, lonelier than I
shall ever again be the rest of my life, wondering what in the hell I should do
next. There was a ripple of laughter from the audience—embarrassed laughter. And
finally, a gentleman from the firm of Price Waterhouse, who handle the vote
tabulation, in a perfect spasm of compassion, grabbed an Emmy off the shelf,
thrust it into my gut like a quarterback handing off to a right half, pointed to
the stairs, and nodded me off. It was later that evening, as I carried the Emmy
through the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria, that suddenly it seemed to grow a
little light, and when I looked down at it, it appeared just a little bit
tarnished. It was wonderful and deserved that Phil Silvers took three major
awards at that dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. It was altogether proper that
Peter Pan was the best single program and that the Caine Mutiny Court-Martial
was the best television adaptation. But there is something just a little bit
straining to the stomach to know that the writer comes in, in the last column,
in the last segment, and receives the award in circumstances that make it appear
to be almost an afterthought. Not too many months ago there was another awards
dinner, for the annual Sylvania presentations. One of the programs was
designated the Best Public Service Documentary of the year. It was a program on
CBS called Out of Darkness, and it had been repeated three times. It was a
moving, powerful and telling story of the effects and treatment of mental
illness, and it also was the work of one individual—A1 Wasserman, who conceived
it, wrote it, and produced it. When the award was announced, the recipient was
not Mr. Wasserman but one Sig Mickleson. Later on, in almost a bone-throwing
gesture, Mr. Wasserman did receive a Certificate of Merit, but the major award
went to one of the vice-presidents of the network, not to the man who was
singularly responsible for the program itself. I have no doubt that Mr.
Mickleson gave great moral and perhaps physical aid to the creation and ultimate
production of Out of Darkness. But, as always, it is a fact that “first came
the word” and that any kudos to be offered should have gone to the writer from
whose mind and at whose typewriter the idea was given life and nurtured—not to a
network executive whose major claim to recognition in this case was simply that
he was permissive to the idea of the program.
I cite these Emmy and Sylvania Award dinners as somehow characteristic of the
almost begrudging attitude the industry saves for its writers. For the rank and
file among them never, or at least rarely, appear as an important adjunct to a
press release. When a show is publicized, it is always the star, sometimes the
story, and almost never the writer. And when the awards are made, despite the
fact that every program owes its basic existence to the efforts of a writer, he
himself stands nearest the end of the line to get his.
I cannot complain because of a lack of identity. I am one of a handful of
fortunates who have been able to grub and battle our way into relative
limelight. I get my publicity—perhaps too much publicity—with little effort.
Chayefsky is the same way. And so are Reginald Rose, Core Vidal, Bob Arthur and
a few others. But to the average men or women who supply the raw materials of
entertainment via the typewriter, recognition is sadly lacking, and if there are
any fingers to be pointed, they must point to the networks and the agencies who
cry for material, but at the same time find the name value of its creators
immaterial.
The Anatomy of Success
On January 13, 1955, the Kraft Television Theatre presented Patterns. One
minute after the show went off the air my phone started to ring. It has been
ringing ever since. There are two ways for a writer to achieve success. One is
the long haul, the establishing of a record of consistent quality in his work.
The other way is the so-called overnight success, charged and generated by a
single piece of writing that captures the imagination and the fancy of the
public and the critics. Patterns was that kind of piece. It came on the air
unheralded, but pushed me into the limelight with a fabled kind of entry. In two
weeks after its initial production ( it was telecast again one month later), the
following happened to me:
I received 23 firm offers for television writing assignments.
I received three motion picture offers for screenplay assignments.
I had fourteen requests for interviews from leading magazines and newspapers.
I had two offers of lunch from Broadway producers.
I had two offers to discuss novels with publishers.
In addition to the above, I sold six television pieces in a row—plays that
had been knocking around for anywhere from six months to three years—and they
all went quickly, with no price-haggling. All of a sudden, with no preparation
and no expectations, I had a velvet mantle draped over my shoulders. I treaded
my way through a brand-new world of dollar-sign mobiles hanging from the sky,
shaking hands with my right hand, depositing checks with my left, watching my
bank account grow, reading my name in the papers and magazines, listening to
myself being complimented unreservedly and extravagantly. It had all the
glittering, dreamlike quality of the sudden and spectacular rise to the top and
it was great to live with for a while—very great. There were moments of disquiet
in the beginning, the sudden cooling off of friends who were afraid to phone
because they were afraid of misconstrued motives. They wanted to remain friends,
not to be glad-handing hangers-on. Into the breach that they left came the other
phone calls from the long line of phonies, the people who a month before didn’t
care if I lived or fell off a bridge. And now they were the loudest in their
praise. They were the perspicacious ones who had “recognized my talent many
years before.” Some of them weren’t phonies really. This is a caste
business. Sometimes you have to wait for people to get into your league before
you invite them to play ball. And this was the case with me. Some producers’
waiting rooms that had provided many hours of heelcooling for me in years passed
suddenly became my old alma mater, and I was the prodigal son when I walked
through the door. These are some of the little accouterments to success that you
never can prepare for but learn, to get accustomed to damn quick once you’ve
achieved it.
And then, almost according to plan, there are new aspects to
your living and your writing that follow this success. For one thing, I had
a spotlight on me and a spotlight on my work. It was constant, bright and revealing.
Like a good horse, or a swivel-hip halfback, I was the guy to watch. I had the
ball, I was up top, and I was fair game. I was studied, assessed, and dissected.
In the month that followed, everything I had on television was plugged, bugled
and advertised. It was also carefully watched and reviewed. The big thing, the
important thing, was that whatever I had on was invariably compared to the one
successful thing I had already done, and also, almost as invariably, the new
piece didn’t t take to the comparison. Overnight successes are almost always
something special. They hit some kind of basic nerve of reaction; they achieve
some fantastic universality; they accomplish by accident so much more than can
usually be accomplished by design. In my case, the first reviews of the shows
after Patterns were charitable; benefits of doubt were freely exchanged. It
was as if the critics were wary of throwing a brickbat at a successful author
for fear that their own analysis might be incorrect. (After all, this is the
guy who wrote Patterns.) But after a time, when the comparisons became even
more obviously negative, the needle was unsheathed. It got longer, it probed
deeper, and I began to bleed. For on the periphery of every success, in the
shadows just outside the limelight, is a hulking, brooding monster known as
a “flash in the pan”1 Patterns wasn’t my only success, but it evolved as the
single standard by which I was judged. It was a point of comparison. It was
the stock reference for quality. And where once its title conjured up the sweet
smell of success, the odor now became just a little acrid and unpleasant and
I began to get sick of it. I’d written other things, I assured people. I made
it a point in interviews to slough off the title and I became preoccupied with
the old plays that preceded it and the new ones to follow. And it wasn’t too
long before I realized that sometimes the writing that brought you success on
a platter was also the writing that evolved as your principal competition.
I now had to fight myself or at least something I’d done. I had something to
prove, first to others and then to myself. I had to prove that Patterns wasn’t
all I had. There had been other things before and there would be other things
to follow.
As it turned out, it look a long time to prove. Almost two years. I thought
that The Rack was better written than Patterns. I thought that Noon on Doomsday
had more innate power. I Thought The Strike, done on Studio One in June 1954,
had more universality and more appeal. But I was a minority of one. On a network
radio interview a few months ago, I was introduced as “Rod Serling, the man
who wrote Patterns and” (a long pause)... and... well... here he is—Rod
Serling.” One of the plays in this volume turned out to be the one that, for
the moment anyway, pushed back this specter of the “flash in the pan.” This
was Requiem for a Heavyweight. It appeared in October 1956 on Playhouse 90 on
CBS. In many ways it seemed to catch the public imagination just as Patterns
had. Its reviews were fabulously good. And now in the columns I’m “Rod
Serling, who wrote Patterns and Requiem for a Heavyweight.”
To any writer, or to any human being for that matter, who has not slept with
success, breathed its rich oxygen, and gamboled through the crazy, pink,
whipped-cream world that it opens up, all this may sound carping and
unimportant. I’ll concede the point that a good bank account, a paid-for car,
and a guarantee of your kids’ education go a long way to compensate for some
momentary hurt feelings and some bad reviews. But I guess it’s part of the
strangely complex human mechanism to want to savor success. Television makes
this impossible. It changes its diet not only weekly and daily, but hourly. A
writer’s claim to recognition doesn’t take the passage of time very well.
This claim gets lost in the shuffle and is forgotten. Marty becomes obscure when
Twelve Angry Men. takes its place. And then Patterns takes over. It moves to the
rear when A Man Is Ten Feet Tall comes to the fore. That, in turn, gets replaced
by A Night to Remember, which is not long remembered when suddenly appears
Requiem for a Heavyweight.
The challenge, the competition, the frenetic, staccato pace
of television is forever pushing people off the pedestal, shoving someone else
up there and continuing the process. To the viewing audience this is a guarantee—almost—of
continuing quality or at least an attempt toward it. To the writer it dictates
the purchase of a scrapbook, which is probably the only way he’ll find permanence
in recognition—in the written record of what he has already done. Because for
better or for worse, television takes all its achievements and makes them history
within a few hours of their presentation.
Whatever the psychological disturbances that stem from the overindulgences
of the overnight success, there are obviously a lot of kicks to becoming known,
financially independent and in demand. Here is a smattering of day-to-day accouterments
to being a reasonably well-known writer.
1) 1 receive on the average of five to ten letters a week with offers of
collaboration (“a guy who writes as much as you must certainly need some fresh
ideas from the outside”). I invariably try to answer every letter, probably
from a sense of compulsion and a good memory. I wrote a lot of correspondence
myself with collaborative ideas before I was eating gravy.
2) 1 drive a 1957 white Lincoln convertible, so long, so garish, so obvious,
that my wife blushes when she looks at it in the driveway. It’s the first big
luxury car I’ve ever owned, and it’s one of the few overt gestures of
ostentatiousness on my part.
3) 1 fell almost immediately into the speech pattern of the theater with its
propensity for terms of endearment (“sweetie,” “baby,” “darling,”
“dear”) . I hate to hear other people use these terms, but I’m aware of
using them constantly. Why?
4) I’m considered to be a cooperative writer—even now. I don’t
get my back up at requests for rewrites. I rarely, if ever, give producers or
directors trouble. But now, as I never did in the early days, I’ll at least
speak my mind about what I consider to be a wrong approach or an incorrect interpretation.
In the pre-Patterns days, I would unquestioningly do any rewrite, change or
delete any conception without a single question asked.
5) I have never ceased liking publicity. This isn’t ego for its own sake,
because I don’t drop names and I don’t purposely seek it. But I still get a
kick when I see my name in the paper, and I probably always will.
6) Bad reviews jar me down to the instep. I will never become philosophically
resigned to a negative reaction to something I’ve written. The difference now
is that I’m more prone to want to share the blame for a bad show. I try to
analyze where the writing was at fault, as opposed to where the production let
it down. In the old days, I invariably made the assumption that it was always
uniquely my fault.
7 ) I have a hell of a schedule and I’m never without a writing project of
some sort. If it isn’t a screenplay it’s a television play.
8 ) I discovered along the way that movies and television are separate
entities, and each makes different demands on writing. You write “big” for
the movies. You let your camera tell considerably more story than you do in
television. You write with a much more pronounced sense of physical action than
you’re permitted in the electronic medium. Television also demands a visual
sense, but very often the progression of a story must be indicated by dialogue.
In the movies, it can often be externalized just by what is seen and not
necessarily by what is heard.
9 ) I like Hollywood and motion pictures, though I felt intimidated when I
went out there to do my first picture. I was at Metro at the time and was given
an office 40 feet long and a secretary, both new to me. Sitting at my desk the
first day, I was approached by a secretary from the hall who had seen my coffee
pot on the desk ( I drink coffee from morning till night) and who asked me if
she might borrow some sugar for a Kaffeeklatsch being held by some writers down
the hall. I gave her the sugar with a little penciled note saying, “This sugar
comes to you courtesy New York television.” The next day the sugar came back,
each cube marked with a skull and crossbones, with the legend, “TV writer—go
home.” This went a long way toward breaking the ice. The next morning I was
invited to the klatsch and I began to make some good and lasting friends from
that moment on. I’m beginning to feel that the Hollywood I felt so intimidated
about is a Hollywood that in many ways doesn’t exist any more—if it ever did.
There once may have existed the Odets version of a phony, falsely glittering
world full of sick people satiated with money, sex, and applause, a flimsy,
unreal world that would disappear if someone were to yell “cut!” But the
Hollywood of today, at least the one I found, had no more than its share of
phonies or neuroses. It was no better and no worse than the New York television
world or, for that matter, any area in the theater. I met a lot of adults in
Hollywood—producers, directors, writers, and some agents whom I was proud to
know. They were sober, intelligent, as-normal-as-I human beings. As in any
social sphere or profession, you pick your own friends and your own social
milieu. You don’t walk on the wild side unless you choose to.
10) In looking back over the relatively short span of my career, I sometimes
make mental notes of the people I’m indebted to. They are legion. But a few of
them bear special mention. There was my first agent, Blanche Gaines, who took me
on when no one else would have me, who browbeat me, mothered me, argued with me,
and did some considerable swinging for me, and to whom I owe a great deal. There
was Dick McDonagh, already mentioned, who gave what is so much at a premium in
this business—time and trouble. There were directors like Ralph Nelson, Johnny
Frankenheimer, Dick Goode and Dan Petrie, who respected me long before a writer
got much respect from most quarters. There were producers like Felix Jackson,
Martin Manulis, Mort Abrahams, who judge a man several feet way from the
bandwagon. And there were the editors like Florence Britton of Studio One and Ed
Rice of Kraft, who professionally and personally gave me many a boost up the
ladder. In the final analysis, it is relatively simple to buy properties from a
well-known writer. I think it takes a helluva lot more insight and a much more
knowledgeable feeling for the profession to buy scripts from unknown
authors—which all of these people did, and continue to do.
11) I don’t know where I’m going and I’m not sure where I am. My
erstwhile success stems from a comparatively small number of plays—far too few,
really, to lay any legitimate claim to permanence in the literary scene. I think
it’s really a moot question as to how I’ve got this far with the present
track record that I lay claim to. I think that I’m a good writer but an
undeveloped one. And I rather think that this applies to most young television
writers. They have benefited enormously from the public attention that has come
to them in far greater degree than that received by most writers in
pre-television days. All of us have an obligation to our craft and to the
audience to justify this attention. We must aim higher, write better, dig
deeper. There are some basic values that apply to all writing, be it television,
movies, the novel or anything else. A writer has to write as best he knows how.
And ultimately, if this effort shows talent, he will be recognized.
Afterthoughts
Television is a potpourri of good things and bad, a medium of promise and
intelligence and, at the same time, an electronic oat-burner in the
always-always land of cliché.
On the negative side, here are some practices in television I feel strongly
enough about to mention. For example, I find it shoddy and inexcusable for
dramatic shows to pick up their actors and actresses after the curtain in the
so-called “Star Dressing Room” and have them ,plug products. Whether or not
their performances during the program were good, this is an absolute guarantee
that they won’t be remembered. All that remains is the memory of a gratuitous,
phony pitch thrust in at the end.
I am embarrassed when movie actresses hired as “Show Hostesses” flounce
into tacky living rooms on certain dramatic film anthologies against a
background of oversweet violins. The embarrassment becomes even more acute when
they launch into a patently ridiculous reason for the plot of the show that
night. For example: “We got a beautiful letter from a farm woman in Idaho
telling us of the romance of corn husking. It’s called She Found Romance While
Corn Husking, and we’ll bring you Act I after this important word to you
ladies about protecting your hands.” I get a violent reaction to certain
dramatic-show emcees who preface each act with a resume of what happened in the
previous act. I assume this is based on a belief that a one-minute commercial
destroys memory and a recapitulation is necessary. But this carry-over of the
old soap-opera technique has no place in the theater, and there is no excuse for
it on television.
I hate most beer commercials, with the notable and refreshing exception of
the Piel Brothers and the incomparable Bert and Harry. The majority of the
cousin brews are littered with catchwords, slogans, and raucous singing jingles
that dent the ears. Cigarette ads seem to be no less offensive on television.
And the worst commercial of any, bar none, is the dramatized doctor-pitchman in
a white medical coat who juggles test tubes and ponderously exhorts you to do
what his “patients” do. Perhaps this is the natural evolution of the old
traveling snake-oil shows, but then, at least, the hucksters did sleight of hand
and a few buck-and-wings before launching into the pitch.
Probably because I am a writer, I am acutely aware of the next television
fault, which makes me wince whenever it is in evidence. This is simply what I
think of as the “oblique slant” of language or theme that is meant to be
earthy, gutsy or tough. Since profanity is frowned on, the medium has devised
its own compensatory language.
“Devil” replaces “hell.” “Blast you” is the alternative to “damn.”
And for anything with more passion, the’ actor just bites his lips in
soundless fury. I remember an emotional second-act curtain in a television play
called The Strike, which I wrote for Studio One in June 1954. An Army officer is
called upon to ask for an air strike on an area where he knows twenty of his own
men are. The scene calls for him to throw a bottle against a map board and say
that he’s just about to give the order to blow his own men to hell! It took
exactly nine days to impress upon the legal department of CBS that in this given
situation an officer wouldn’t say “darn,” “shucks,” or “gosh.” To
retain the one word took all the efforts of the program’s editor, Florence
Britton, the producer, Felix Jackson, and the director, Frank Schaffner, but
finally we won our little semantic victory. And I remember Floss Britton coming
back into the studio the day of the show, bussing me lightly on my flushed and
excited cheek and saying “We’re in business, Roddy. We traded them two damns
for the hell!”
This is a more specialized dislike, but very often the writer is called upon
to pad a part to make it more palatable to a sought-after actor or actress. But
this goes on all the time when a script is submitted by the writer and in turn
sent over to the agency for the actors to read. These people owe their careers
to exposure and the right kind of exposure, but many a good script has died
aborning because it has been constitutionally unable to withstand the onslaught
of padding a role, or twisting a story line to change a characterization. In the
miserably tight time framework of a television play, there is room for only so
many lines and so much story. For every added line, one must be deleted, and it
is this cycle of add and withdraw that does irreparable damage to a story.
But there are a lot of things in the medium I write for that I like and
admire. They are more than things really; they are people as well. I like most
of the editors I’ve worked with. The editor is in the totally untenable
position of acting as a catalyst in a weekly situation that involves the writer
on one end and the advertising agency on the other. His is the constant hassle
of passing on the agency’s fears to the writer with enough diplomatic finesse
to keep the writer from cutting his throat. At the same time, the editor has to
keep the script as intact as possible without the agency’s yanking it o$
because of their fears. This latter action is not an everyday occurrence, but it
does happen. One script of mine called The Bomb Fell on Thursday was cast and
had one rehearsal, and the sets were ordered, when the agency yanked it because
of a question of “taste.” Writers and editors together have to face up to
one basic truth: the agency is all-powerful. It is extremely difficult to cross
the Young and Rubicam!
I also like the television directors. They are mostly a young
lot. And if the reader has ever watched a television drama produced in a studio,
he realizes the consummate talent required of them. They must know acting and
actors, sets and designs, lighting and sounds, blocking and business, story
and writer. And at that point where the legitimate play director quietly steals
off into the darkness in the rear of the theater to entrust his work to the
opening-night cast--this is when the TV director works the hardest in the most
trying, frenetic, inhuman tension imaginable. At this point he’s an obstetrician
assisting at a birth, but he’s also nurse, anesthetist and general manager of
the hospital. When it’s close to air time, and I happen to be on the set, I
invariably break into a cold sweat, wondering how in God’s name this show will
ever get on the road. Nerves, like the common cold, are easily transmitted.
I can remember one time on the Danger show when I was bodily removed from the
set by John Frankenheimer (6’5”) because I was turning his actors’ sense of
well-being into a shambles by gratuitously reminding them of their cues and
stage directions. A couple of years later, on another show directed by John,
he saw to it that I received a little gift just prior to air time. It was a
beribboned box that on being opened revealed a neatly wrapped package of adhesive
tape.
I can’t say that I “like” television critics because I really
don’t know many personally. But I respect them and I’m glad they’re around.
Their presence is a tacit assertion that the television program is an art form
that warrants and merits critical analysis. The function of the television critic
is somewhat different from that of his counterparts who review movies and plays.
The latter are, in a basic sense, previewers. Their writing is read to determine
whether a movie or play is worth the price of admission and the inconvenience
of getting there. The television critic analyzes a play or program that is already
a fact. He can bring no one in, and discourage no one to keep away. His is a
critique and not a preview. It’s a needle or a back-slap that can in no way
affect whatever is in the record. My own feeling is that the television critic
has one primary purpose. He’s there to needle and prod the industry into quality.
He’s there as a reminder that nothing can be slipped by. His very presence sets
up certain absolute standards to be aimed at. His approval is solicited, his
disapproval keenly felt and pondered. When Jack Gould or J. P. Shanley in The
New York Times dislikes something, this precludes the possibility of a “smash,”
and, conversely, their benign approval is cause for celebration on the part
of the writer and all concerned. In the case of my own Patterns, the demand
for a repeat was generated by the critics and columnists. Jack Gould’s calling
it “. . . one of those inspired moments that make the theatre the wonder that
it is . . .” did more to make it a TV legend than the thousands of letters sent
in by viewers. Critics, in short, pack weight. As to the legitimacy of the various
analyses, this is not nearly so absolute as the standards the critic sets up
for the industry he writes about. Ten different TV critics will come up with
ten different reactions to a given television play. Check the following box
score, for example, as it applies to the critical reaction toward one of my
shows on Studio One.
HARRY HARRIS, Philadelphia Inquirer:
“In The Arena on Studio One last night, Serling did much to regain his
Patterns prestige.”
ERNEST SCHIER, Philadelphia News:
“I doubt if anything quite as childish transpires as that depicted in Rod
Serling’s contribution to Studio One last night...”
BURTON RASCOE, syndicated columnist:
“An instructive, semi-documentary on the initiation of a new senator in
Washington, with a salutary and agreeable sermon, implied rather than stated...”
JACK ROSENSTEIN, The Hollywood Reporter:
“Rod Serling must have had to blast his way through the cobwebs with a
blowtorch to get to the old trunk from which he resurrected The Arena... An hour
is a real long time for an issue such as this, with characters so conventional
and with long maudlin speeches of mawkish idealism and pat dialogue.”
DAVE KAUFMAN, Daily Variety:
“Chalk up another powerful teleplay for Rod Serling. This time he
incisively explores the practice and moral climate of politics...”
GEORGE CONDON, The Cleveland Plain Dealer:
“Rod Serling’s Studio One story, The Arena, turned out to be one of the
finest dramatic productions of the year... it was thrilling to encounter a show
that went past the superficial plot into the real dramatic conflict that rages
inside men who are torn between good and evil...” |
