Harlan Ellison's Watching (45 page)

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/October 1985

As I write this, another film murder is in progress.

I leave for London and Scotland tomorrow (5 July), and this column is my final chore in front of the typewriter. When these words get to your eyes, I'll have returned to Los Angeles; I'll have sat in William Friedkin's back pocket as he directed my teleplay adaptation of Stephen King's "Gramma" for
The Twilight Zone
; I'll have voyaged far to Australia Incognita and will have returned with or without a Hugo for non-fiction; I'll have watched with pleasure the Friday-night-in-September premiere of CBS-TV's revival of
TZ . . .
and the murder will be merely another footnote in the history of the cinema.

Much will have happened between this writing and your reading of what I'm about to set down.

And were it not that your faithful hawkshaw got the wind up, this killing of a movie—like the crib-death of
Dune
, about which I wrote two columns recently—would be yet another perfect crime. Nor would you be apprised of how willingly you were accomplices.

Much of life will have transpired and in the impression of humanity's footsteps left behind, no one will notice, I fear, that another butterfly has been crushed underfoot. That's poetry.

Last time, I urged you to rush out and see
Return to Oz
(Walt Disney Productions). I managed to slip that appeal into the column when the galleys were returned for proofing because I'd gotten the wind up, had begun to smell the
déjà vu
of what had befallen
Dune
, and I didn't want the murder to go unnoticed because of a delay in getting the word to you, resulting from this magazine's monthly publication schedule. I wanted you to catch this film before it vanished from your local theaters.

And it did vanish, didn't it? Quickly.

I have given you the date on which I'm typing these words, because the months between this date and your reading of the words have not yet passed. So what I write is, at this moment, prediction. As you read the words, it's history. If I smelled the charnel house smell, and am not merely a victim of paranoid conspiracy-theory, then you will know what I'm about to say has the ring of truth in it; otherwise how could I have predicted it?

If the events of the intervening months do not back up my assertions, then I'm dyin' cuz I'm lyin'.

I began to smell the odor of filmic crib-death even before
Return to Oz
opened; and I implored you to ignore the witless and intransigent negative reviews that were everywhere to be found; to treat yourselves to an afternoon or evening basking in the marvels of this wondrous fantasy while you could.

Because if my snoot was accurate, if you put off the going to see it,
Return to Oz
would be gone; and who knows how it'll play on videocassette or cable television a year from now?

In the trade, they call it "dumping."

I call it crib-death. Strangling the infant before it gets its legs through word-of-mouth. (In the trade, mixed metaphor works. In the trade,
everything
works, including executives who've been exposed as embezzlers, charlatans, wrong-guessers, idiots and knaves.)

If you followed the reasoning I put forth in the matter of
Dune's
early demise, you were no doubt left with one nagging question:
why
(if Ellison's correct that Universal sabotaged its own release) did a major film company program the catastrophic failure of a forty million dollar epic that should have made its year-end p&I sheets vibrate with profits?

I had the same question.

It was only recently that an Informed Source gave me the answer. (Informed, but also, necessarily, Unnamed. Bamboo slivers under the fingernails cannot drag the name from me. You'll just have to take my word for it that said Source exists, oh yes said Source do. Everybody in the trade talks, and many there be who will summon up the
cojones
to blow the whistle; but swift and ugly reprisal is a fact of life in the trade, and I see no reason why an act of honesty should result in someone's losing his/her livelihood. Rather would I have you consider what I say with skepticism.)

My Unnamed Source called to tell me that the budget on
Dune
was not, as I and every other American journalist reported, a mere forty million dollars. It was more than $75,000,000!

So unless
Dune
had been a runaway hit on the level of
Beverly Hills Cop
or
Rambo
there was absolutely
no way
Universal was going to come out on the black side of the ledger.

It was very likely going to be a loser, but it need not have been
such
a loser. Sabotage from within, it now seems obvious, was the final nail in
Dune
's coffin. But why? The answer lies in the power politics and job-hopping of studio executives.

When I expressed disbelief at such a berserk answer, my Informed Source chided me for naïvete. It is not, however, wide-eyed innocence on my part that forces me to express doubts. It is the canker on the rose called libel. In
Synopsis of the Law of Libel and the Right of Privacy
, by Bruce W. Sanford, a pamphlet for journalists published by Scripps-Howard Newspapers, among the words and phrases "red flagged" as containing potentially actionable potency, we find the following: altered records, blackguard, cheats, corruption, coward, crook, fraud, liar, moral delinquency, rascal, scam, sold out, unethical and villain. Also on the list are booze hound, deadbeat, fawning sycophant, groveling office seeker, herpes, Ku Klux Klan and unmarried mother. But those have nothing to do with the topic at hand. Just thought I'd get them in for a little cheap sensationalism.

So what I will report here is carefully written. Facts and some philosophy. The linkages are yours to make.

Success and failure in the film colony are adduced on the basis of one's most recent production. Even an inept booze hound or fawning sycophant affiliated with a hit movie glows with the golden radiance of its success. A set designer or actor who did a splendid job in connection with a flop gets tarred with the same brush as the fools who came a cropper. Take director Martin Brest, as an example. Marty's first film after creating the brilliant
Hot Tomorrows
while still in attendance at the American Film Institute, was
Going in Style
(1979), which did not do well. Marty could not get arrested (as it is warmly phrased in the trade) for three years. That's a long time to go without a job if you're a young director. Then he made
Beverly Hills Cop
in 1984. We all know how big that film hit. (Which was a fluke that Destiny had in its rucksack for Marty, who deserves all good breaks, for he is an enormously talented artist; a fluke in that Stallone was originally set to play the lead, backed out for whatever reasons, and was replaced by Eddie Murphy, who can do no wrong onscreen.)

But now, Martin Brest is the hottest director in Hollywood.

And everyone with the film at Paramount—including then-studio heads Michael Eisner and Barry Diller—got hot with him. So they moved over to Disney. But that gets relevant later in this essay.

The point being that executives hop from studio to studio on the basis of how good they looked when they left. And frequently that has more to do with what happens to a movie than how good or bad the film is intrinsically. So a fact of film industry life that you've never known till now is the truth that an exec wanting to look to his shareholders as one who saved a studio in decline, necessarily tries to make his/her predecessors look bad. The worse they look, the better he/she looks if/when the new exec presents a bountiful p&l sheet at year-end.

I present the preceding as philosophy only.

Here is a fact. In 1982, when Universal picked up
Dune
for distribution from Dino De Laurentiis, the administration of that film mill was under the aegis of President Bob Rehme (now Pres./CEO of New World Pictures). But by 1984 when
Dune
was released, Rehme was gone and Frank Price (who had hopped over from Columbia) was President of Universal.

As I recounted in detail in installments 9 and 10 of this column, what happened to
Dune
bore all the earmarks of a classic "dumping" scenario. That's how it looked to those of us who write about the film industry, and the conclusion is borne out by my Unnamed Source. Change of administration, a disaster credited to Rehme, and the new Priests of the Black Tower can only move upward, appearancewise, even if the next p&l is only adequate.

The same is happening to
Return to Oz
as I write this.

The film is being orphaned by Disney's new management, the Eisner-Diller combine. That's how it looks to me.

The evidence is out there for you to integrate, if you look even casually: no television advertising to speak of; small newsprint ads; few positive quotes; the film yanked from movie houses after a short run. And only now, several weeks after its premiere, are talk-show interviews with principals from the film being booked. The film came in around $32 million. The studio cut out most of the publicity back in March, three months before
Return to Oz
was scheduled to open; and it had an opening week advertising budget of approximately $4–4.5 million. This is extremely low for a major release. A typical figure for a comparable film would be $7–10 million, aided by heavy saturation on the talk-show circuit. Those are facts; evidence.

But here's what was going on behind the scenes.

The old Disney marketing department was essentially in place from the start of production late in 1983, until early in 1985. Then the new studio management of Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenberg started playing a direct hand.

Barry Glasser, the Vice President of Publicity, was unhappy and left the studio in March for a production development position with a Japanese animation company, TMS.

Frequently, studios hire outside publicity and advertising agencies to work with the in-house marketing department. The new management of Disney hired Young & Rubicam in February or March of 1985. Gordon Weaver, a former head of Paramount's marketing division and head of Y&R Entertainment, was given charge of the
Return to Oz
account. Unlike most agency/studio relationships, the agency started giving the orders to the studio personnel, leaving the marketing department in an unusual and untenable position. Barry Lorie, head of marketing for Disney, was so undercut by these goings-on that he was left with virtually little authority. It is common knowledge that Lorie bided his time, taking what was dished out, until an opportunity to hop presented itself. (It was announced during the last week in June that he would be leaving Disney due to "philosophical differences with the new management of the studio.")

If one were to examine the facts, the evidence, and consider the
modus operandi
of dumping in the trade, one might feel that the situation as regards
Return to Oz
is philosophically consistent with historical precedent. I think that is a safe legal locution.

It is not enough to say, "Well, the critics hated the movie," because audiences seem to love it; and hideous films of virtually no value are hyped in huge measure to get the potential audience's appetite whetted. But nothing much was done for
Oz
, and now the new Disney administration can say, "Well, it isn't reaching the market we thought would welcome it. We have to cut our losses." Orphaned. Dumped. Murdered.

And as producer Gary Kurtz knows, and as he told Disney, it is important to remember that the 1939
Wizard of Oz
was a box-office disaster, and remained so until it was purchased for television in the early '60s, from which time it has been regarded by the general public (not just us enthusiasts) as a "classic." But such need not have been the case with
Return to Oz
. It is a remarkable piece of movie making, true to the Baum canon, and worthy of being successful.

So we must ask the question,
how
did Eisner know
Return to Oz
wouldn't reach its audience back in February or March, long before it opened? Because that is when the advertising budget was cut and helter-skelter was introduced as the standard operating procedure. Unless he possesses a clairvoyance that ought to be scrutinized by the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (3151 Bailey Avenue; Buffalo, New York 14215; publishers of
The Skeptical Inquirer
; an organization and a magazine you should support if you, as I, despise all the obscurantism and illogic from Creationism to Astrology that pollutes our world), one of the few rational explanations is that dumping has occurred.

If there is another rationale that can fit in with the evidence, this column is anxiously waiting to publish such an explanation. From Paramount. From Disney. From anyone who feels compelled to let us know that the world is not what our intellect tells us it is.

Until that time, it saddens me to have to advise those of you who went for the okeydoke that
Return to Oz
was a stinker, that you have been willing accomplices to the murder of a piece of cinematic delight.