Dreamsongs - Volume II Read Free Page A

the
Grateful Dead shows we cared to see. You couldn’t say no to that.
     
    He mailed me the
show’s bible and a stack of sample scripts, and I sent him a stack of
tearsheets and xerox copies of stories I thought might make good Twilight
Zone episodes. Since I had never done a teleplay before, I wanted to make
things easier for myself by doing an adaptation rather than an original story.
That way, I could concentrate on mastering the form, rather than having to come
up with the plot and characters and dialogue as well. Adaptations did not pay
as well as originals, but I was more concerned with not making an utter fool of
myself than I was with making money.
     
    DeGuere liked a
number of the stories I sent them, and half a dozen would end up becoming
episodes of TZ-2 , some adapted by me, some by other hands. For my first
outing, however, the tale that was chosen was ‘Nackles,’ a Christmas horror
fable by a writer named Curt Clark. I’d found it in an obscure Terry Carr
anthology.
     
    Nackles was the
sort of idea that makes you slap your head and cry, Why didn’t I think
of that?’ Every god must have his devil. Nackles was the Anti-Santa. On
Christmas Eve, while Santa Claus is flying around the world in his sled,
sliding down chimneys to leave presents for good boys and girls, Nackles is
moving through pitch dark tunnels beneath the earth in a railroad car pulled by
a team of blind white goats, and crawling up through the furnace grate to stuff
bad boys and girls in his big black sack.
     
    I was delighted by
Phil’s choice. ‘Nackles’ seemed to me to be a perfect Twilight Zone, given
a faithful adaptation. I also took a little pleasure imagining the thrill the
sale would give Curt Clark, this obscure, forgotten little writer, who I
pictured teaching English composition at some community college in Nowhere,
North Dakota or Godforsaken, Georgia.
     
    It turned out that ‘Curt
Clark’ was a pseudonym for Donald E. Westlake, the bestselling author of the
wonderful Dortmunder series and a hundred other mysteries and crime novels,
half of which had been turned into feature films. It also turned out, once
rights had been secured and I had signed my contract, that the guys at Twilight
Zone did not want a faithful adaptation of Westlake’s story. They liked the
notion of the Anti-Santa, but not the rest of it: the abusive former football
star who invents Nackles to terrorize his children, his wife and kids, the
brother-in-law who narrates the story. All of that had to go, I was told.
Before I could start my script, I would need to come up with a whole new story
for Nackles and present it in a treatment.
     
    (So much for
adaptations being easier.)
     
    I came up with half
a dozen ways to handle ‘Nackles.’ The first one or two I wrote up as formal
treatments, the later ones I pitched to Harlan over the phone. He didn’t like
any of them. After a month of this, I hit a wall. I had no more fresh ideas for
‘Nackles,’ and remained convinced that the best way to handle the material was
the way Westlake handled it in his story. Harlan was growing as frustrated as I
was, and I got the impression that Phil DeGuere was ready to pull the plug.
     
    At that point
Harlan came up with an idea. Another episode had also been giving trouble, an
original called ‘The Once and Future King,’ about an Elvis impersonator who
travels back in time and finds himself face-to-face with Elvis. A freelancer
named Bryce Maritano had done several drafts of the script, but DeGuere and his
team still felt it needed work. I was no stranger to rock’n roll, as The
Armageddon Rag bore witness. Harlan suggested a switch. He would take over ‘Nackles’
himself, and I would move to the Maritano script. Phil thought that was worth a
try, and the swap was made . . . with fateful consequences for all concerned.
     
    The subsequent tale
of ‘Nackles’ is as horrifying as Nackles himself. Harlan Ellison’s approach to
the story met with more