Harlan Ellison's Watching (73 page)

"Are you crazy?"

"What, crazy?"

"That's
stealing!
It's plagiarism!"

"Who'll know?"

"
I'll
know, you asshole!"

"I don't have to listen to that kinda talk!"

"You're right," I said, rising. "You don't." And I left.

To this day, he doesn't realize he was suggesting something disreputable beyond the telling.

And
that
is the attitude that prevails in Hollywood.
Now
do you understand?

There is, in these people, the imbrication of arrogance and stupidity that is as impenetrable to ethic as an armadillo's hide. If they chance upon a concept that manages to penetrate, and they can identify it with some film already made that did big box-office, and if it is not so different that when they pitch it, the similarity to the successful former film escapes the studio boss or the network honcho, they will offer it as their own. That it came from some other creative source does not enter into their thinking.
We'll change it, it'll work
, they say. And those to whom they are pitching are equally as ignorant of sources, so they enter unwittingly into the conspiracy to steal.

Which may or may not be what happened with
The Running Man
and
The Hidden
. But though we've drawn nearer to that door behind which lies a horror unspeakable, we will all have to wait till installment 31 for the conclusion of the thesis of Li'l White Lies. Which may not be a goddam LAW OF THE UNIVERSE but if it ain't, it oughtta be!

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ August 1988

Being lied to. Selling inferior goods by duping us with assertions that said grubby goods have "phantom values" apart from what we see on the screen:
The Emerald Forest
supposedly based on a true story;
Ladyhawke
a retelling of medieval legends;
Hangar 18
revealing suppressed Air Force knowledge of UFOs; lies, everyone of them. Lures, cynically dangled.

Being lied to. Promoting films of rape, violence, ethical debasement, moral turpitude, inhuman behavior, sexism with prolonged graphic representations in adoring closeup, and then justifying it by wide-eyed explanation that "we show you this woman having an icepick driven into her eye to show you how much we disapprove of it." Exploitation, pandering to the debased nature of the contemporary audience, feeding the sickness. Rationalizing and justifying and excusing . . . with lies.

Being lied to. Using the ignorance of the audience against itself. Telling us that by coloring stylish black-and-white films like
Casablanca
and
The Maltese Falcon
, they offer them to a generation of young viewers who won't go to a movie if it isn't in color. Denying to that generation the experience of seeing such
objets d'art
as they were intended to be seen. Producing by such corruption of the audience a self-fulfilling prophecy, by which the ignorant are kept ignorant . . . in the sense of uneducated.

Being lied to. As we examined such misrepresentation last time, through the noxious practice of plagiarism. Parvenus and no-talents, rampant in the film industry, incapable of creating new dreams themselves, hungering for sinecures as directors and producers while condemning writers to the beanfield labor of actually doing the screenplay and then having it wrested from them so they can "reinterpret." Unabashedly stealing ideas and concepts and entire screenplays, recasting them in their own cliché-riddled manner, and sending them out to market, to an audience with either short memories or no memories. If you have seen the Clint Eastwood film
Pale Rider
and are not deeply infuriated at it . . . then you are the ignorant of whom I speak. And if you look bewildered at that: remark, and your attitude turns rancid against he who points out that you are cerebrose in this matter, then I suggest you go and rent videocassettes of that film and
Shane
. And if you do not perceive very quickly that
Pale Rider
is a shameless, awful ripoff of the A.B. Guthrie-Jack Sher adaptation of Jack Schaefer's exquisite novel (combined with a ripoff of the "ghost" element from the 1972 Eastwood vehicle
High Plains Drifter
, written by Ernest Tidyman), then you are dumber than I think. And you deserve no better than rudeness, because your ignorance only permits this evil to flourish.

So let us consider two recent films that mayor may not be ripoffs of famous science fiction stories. Two films that did extremely well at the box office, and have been lauded as fresh and original ideas by critics utterly unaware of the vast body of sf material that has been fueling the engines of film thieves for fifty years. Two films that take the basic ideas already existent in sf stories, simplify them, render them in much cruder form, and deny to the original authors the ability ever to have
their
work translated to the screen.

The first is
The Running Man
(Taft Entertainment/Keith Barish Productions) and the second is
The Hidden
(New Line Cinema).

In the Los Angeles
Daily News
of 13 November 87, a gentleman named Michael Healy, who is identified as "Daily News Film Critic," says this of
The Running Man:

"Schwarzenegger stumbles and falls flat in this futuristic satire on TV game shows with a plot lifted from Richard Connell's story 'The Most Dangerous Game.' Stephen King did the lifting under the name Richard Bachman, and Steven de Souza turned it all into a screenplay about as original as a speech by Joe Biden."

Close. Very close. And one must admire Mr. Healy for not only getting full writing credits into the first three paragraphs of his review—as opposed to most "film critics" who find it less of a strain on their limited intelligence to use the odious crush word "sci-fi" than to describe an individual film as what it
is
, without recourse to a demeaning neologism . . . and who ease that strain on their gray tapioca matter even more by pretending the director wrote the film, with never a scenarist credit to be found passim the review, much less a reference to the original source material—but Healy draws our applause for additionally noting the historical precedent for the plot. A film critic who not only
reads
(New Miracles! New Miracles!) but who has a sense of literary ebb and flow. And he's close, very close.

Yes, the famous 1924 Connell short story (oft-refilmed) is certainly the master template for
The Running Man
, but it isn't the
specific
work pilfered. We come to Steven de Souza's ankyloglossial screenplay by way of the 1982 NAL paperback novel pseudonymously penned by Stephen King. And we come to Bachman's
The Running Man
by way of Robert Sheckley's famous short story "The Prize of Peril" (
The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
, May 1958). If you don't remember the yarn, go find it in Sheck's collections
Store of Infinity, The Wonderful World of Robert Sheckley
, or anyone of several dozen anthologies in which it has been reprinted. It's about this guy who becomes an unwilling contestant on a nationally-obsessive tv program where you run and run and people try to kill you.

It was the story that sparked the campus fad some years back, for hunter/victim games in which students stalked each other and "killed" each other with paint-squibs from toy guns. Which fad, in turn, sparked a dreadful movie titled
Gotcha!

When the Bachman book first appeared, it drew almost no attention, because no one knew it was Stephen behind the nom-de-plume. But when it came out, and prices for those four NAL throwaway adventure novels by "Bachman" went through the roof in antiquarian bookdealer catalogues that provide Colombian Gold-level fixes for King addicts, and NAL reissued the books in an omnibus volume, I received a call from Sheckley.

"Have you read
The Running
Man?" he asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"Listen: I may be crazy," Sheck said, with considerable nervousness and more than a scintilla of reluctance to rush to judgment, "but do you see a lot of my story 'The Prize of Peril' in that book?"

I said, "Yes, I see it as being damned nearly the same plot, done at length."

A silence passed between us. A long silence, in which each of us tried to find a way to speak the unspeakable, to approach that dreadful door behind which lay the necessity to think the unthinkable. Finally, Bob said:

"Well, what do you think?"

And I said, very carefully, "I know Steve, and I know damned well he wouldn't steal. It's that simple. But Stephen has often said that he's been inspired by films and stories he's read years before, that slipped down into the back of his head. This might be one of those cases."

Again a silence. And at last Sheckley asked, very hesitantly,

"Do you think I should do something about this?"

"I think you ought to talk to Stephen."

What lay in the subtext of our conversation was the dire possibility that
something would have to be done
. As one who has been compelled to pursue legal means to redress the sins of plagiarism committed against me by film companies and TV networks, I was careful not to put Sheckley in a state of paranoia about
The Running Man
. But talking to Stephen King seemed the correct way to go about it. Sheckley asked me if I'd call Steve and give him Bob's number, and ask if he'd call.

I said I would; I called Steve and we talked; and he said he remembered reading "The Prize of Peril" years and years before; and he assured me he'd call Sheckley to work it out.

That call transpired, and Sheckley later told me he was satisfied with King's open remarks. The sense I got from what Sheck said, was that Steve may well have dredged out of the mire of memory the basic plotline of "Prize of Peril," never remembering it as an actual reading experience but transforming it, as all writers do, into the self-generated conceit that was published as
The Running Man
.

The aphorist Olin Miller has said, "Of all liars, the smoothest and most convincing is memory."

For those who have read Stephen King's
The Tommyknockers
and continue to endure the
frisson
of
déjà vu
, I suggest you rent the videocassette of
Five Million Years to Earth
(1968). And when you compare them, understand that I do not in even the tiniest way suggest that Stephen King cops the work of other writers. Let me say that again, even stronger, so no one of even the most diminished capacity can read into my words the ugly intimation:
Stephen King does not steal
. He's too good to
have
to steal. But in the realm of sf/fantasy there are ideas that we rework and re-rework, recast and refashion, expand and transmogrify, that become common coin. James Blish was not the first writer to use the "enclosed universe" concept, but who would deny his reinterpretation of Bob Heinlein's "Universe" as the extraordinary "Surface Tension"? And if Heinlein was sparked to write
The Puppet Masters
after being enthralled by Wells's
War of the Worlds
, is there anyone idiot enough to suggest it was plagiarism?

No, literary crossover happens. And we are all enriched by it.

But "The Prize of Peril" is a richer way of telling the story at hand than
The Running Man
, especially as debased by Steven de Souza and Schwarzenegger. The lie we are fed, is the lie that
The Running Man
is a fresh, bold, new idea.

And if we look at
The Hidden
, from a screenplay by Robert Hunt, we can see the basic plot core of Hal Clement's famous novel of interplanetary cops-and-robbers,
Needle
. And we can see
The Hidden
ripped off for television as NBC's
Something Is Out There
, the pilot of which aired recently, with the promise that if there
is
a Fall Season, we'll be getting Hal Clement's
Needle
as a series written and produced by people who think
Something Is Out There
is only first-generation theft, when it all proceeds from Clement . . . who won't see a cent of the millions these arrivistes will rake in.

The lie we are told is that these watered-down, scientifically illiterate, mook-level ripoffs are the Real Thing. And that is why, in installment 30 ½ of this column, I urged the Science Fiction Writers of America to reinstate the Dramatic Writing category in the Nebula awards. If sf writers don't move to quash the lie, then who will? And if the readers and writers in the genre don't come to their senses and stop accepting this institutionalized theft, on which the lie floats blissfully, then those of you who praise
dreck
like
The Running Man
deserve no better than you get. Behind that dreadful door through which you, as innocent moviegoers, pass to nullify your reason with special effects and the idolatry of Schwarzeneggers and Stallones and Michael J. Foxes, lies the awful truth that the treasurehouse of ideas sf has filled since (at least) 1926, is being systematically looted by people who sneer at the concept of primacy of ownership of the creators.