Phoenix Without Ashes Read Free

Writers Guild,” he said.
    It drove Kline bananas. Everywhichway he turned, I was there, confounding his shabby attempts at circumventing an honest strike.
    I’ll skip a little now. The details were ugly, but grow tedious in the retelling. It went on at hideous length, for weeks. Finally, Glen Warren in Toronto, at Kline’s urging, managed to get the Canadian writers guild, ACTRA, to accept that The Starlost was a wholly Canadian-produced series. They agreed that was the case, after much pressure was applied in ways I’m not legally permitted to explicate, and I was finally convinced I should go to work.
    That was my next mistake.
    They had been circulating copies of the scab bible with all of its erroneous material, and had even given names to the characters. When I finally produced the authentic bible, for which they’d been slavering so long, it confused everyone. They’d already begun building sets and fashioning materiel that had nothing to do with the show.
    I was brought up to Toronto, to work with writers, and because the producing entity would get government subsidies if the show was clearly acceptable in terms of “Canadian content” (meaning the vast majority of writers, actors, directors, and production staff had to be Canadian), I was ordered to assign script duties to Canadian TV writers.
    I sat in the Four Seasons Motel in Toronto in company with a man named Bill Davidson, who had been hired as the producer, even though he knew nothing about science fiction and seemed thoroughly confused by the bible, and interviewed dozens of writers from 9 A.M. till 7 P.M.
    It is my feeling that one of the prime reasons for the artistic (and, it would seem, ratings) failure of The Starlost was the quality of the scripts. But it isn’t as simple a matter as saying the Canadians aren’t good writers, which is the cop-out Glen Warren and Kline use. Quite the opposite is true. The Canadian writers I met were bright, talented, and anxious as hell to write good shows.
    Unfortunately, because of the nature of Canadian TV, which is vastly different from American TV, they had virtually no experience writing episodic drama as we know it. (“Train them,” Kline told me. “Train a cadre of writers?” I said, stunned. “Sure,” said Kline, who knew nothing about writing, “it isn’t hard.” No, not if I wanted to make it my life’s work.) And, for some peculiar reason, with only two exceptions I can think of, there are no Canadian sf writers.
    But they were willing to work their hearts out to do good scripts. Sadly, they didn’t have the kind of freaky minds it takes to plot a sf story with originality and logic. There were the usual number of talking plant stories, giant ant stories, space pirate stories, westerns transplanted to alien environments, the Adam-&-Eve story, the after-the-Bomb story... the usual cliches people who haven’t been trained to think in fantasy terms conceive of as fresh and new.
    Somehow, between Ben Bova, and myself—Ben having been hired after I made it abundantly clear that I needed a specialist to work out the science properly—we came up with ten script ideas, and assigned them. We knew there would be massive rewrite problems, but I was willing to work with the writers, because they were energetic and anxious to learn. Unfortunately, such was not the case with Davidson and the moneymen from 20th, NBC, Glen Warren, and the CTV, who were revamping and altering arrangements daily, in a sensational imitation of The Mad Caucus-Race from Alice in Wonderland.
    I told the Powers-In-Charge that I would need a good assistant story editor who could do rewrites, because I was not about to spend the rest of my natural life in a motel in Toronto, rewriting other people’s words. They began to scream. One gentleman came up to the room and banged his fist on the desk while I was packing to split, having received word a few hours earlier that my mother was dying in Florida. He told me I was going to