Dreamsongs - Volume II Read Free Page B

approval than mine had, and his script was duly written
and given the green light. Ed Asner was cast in the lead role, and Harlan
himself was set to direct. He had added a new twist to the Westlake story,
however, one that drew the ire of the network censors. In the midst of
preproduction, ‘Nackles’ was brought to a screeching halt by Standards and
Practices. For those who are curious, all the grisly details of what followed
can be found in Harlan’s collection Slippage (Houghton Mifflin, 1998),
along with Westlake’s original story and Harlan’s teleplay. Despite good faith
efforts by Phil and Harlan to address the network’s concerns, the CBS censors
proved unrelenting. ‘Nackles’ was scrapped, and Harlan left the show.
     
    Meanwhile, I was
still at home in Santa Fe, a thousand miles away from the storms, reading up
about the King. Elvis had shouldered Nackles aside. I wrote my treatment of ‘The
Once and Future King,’ and when that was approved, I launched into the script.
It was the first teleplay I had ever attempted, so it took me longer than it
should have. I shot it off to The Twilight Zone with considerable
trepidation. If Phil did not like what I’d done, I figured, my first teleplay
would also be my last.
     
    He did like it. Not
well enough to shoot my first draft, mind you (I soon learned that in Hollywood
no one ever likes a script that much) .. . but well enough to offer me a
staff job after ‘Nackles’ blew up and Harlan’s departure left the Zone shorthanded.
Suddenly I was off to a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas,
somewhere between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge:
Studio City, California.
     
    I joined the series
near the end of its first season, as a lowly Staff Writer (you know the position
is lowly if the title includes the word ‘writer’). My first contract was for
six weeks, and even that seemed optimistic. After a strong start, the ratings
for TZ-2had slumped off steadily, and no one knew whether CBS would
renew the series for a second season. I began my stint by doing several more
drafts of ‘The Once and Future King,’ then moved on to new scripts, adaptations
of Roger Zelazny’s ‘The Last Defender of Camelot’ and Phyllis Eisenstein’s ‘Lost
and Found.’ Six weeks of talking story with DeGuere, Crocker, Brennert, and O’Bannon,
reading scripts, giving and taking notes, sitting in on pitch meetings, and
watching the show being filmed taught me more than I could have learned in six
years back in Santa Fe. None of my own scripts went before the cameras until
the very end, when ‘The Last Defender of Camelot’ was finally sent into
production.
     
    Casting, budgets,
pre-production meetings, working with a director; all of it was new to me. My
script was too long and too expensive. That would prove to be a hallmark of my
career in film and television. All my scripts would be too long and too
expensive. I tried to keep Roger Zelazny informed of all the changes we had to
make, so he would not be too taken aback when he saw his story on the air. At
one point, our line producer Harvey Frand came to me with a worried look on his
face. ‘You can have horses,’ he told me, ‘or you can have Stonehenge. But you
can’t have horses and Stonehenge.’ That was a hard call, so I put the
question to Roger. ‘Stonehenge,’ he said at once, and Stonehenge it was.
     
    They built it on
the sound stage behind my office, with wood and plaster and painted canvas. If
there had been horses on the stage, Stonehenge would have trembled like a leaf
every time one pounded by, but without horses, the fake rocks worked fine. Not
so the stuntwork, alas. The director wanted to see Sir Lancelot’s face during
the climactic swordfight, which entailed removing the visor from Richard Kiley’s
helm . . . and that of his stunt double as well. All went well until someone
zigged instead of zagging during the swordplay, and the stunt man’s nose