stay there in that room till the first drafts of the ten scripts came in. He told me that I was going to write the pilot script in that room and not leave till it was finished. He told me I could go home but would be back on such-and-such a date. He told me that was my schedule.
I told him if he didn’t get the hell out of my room I was going to clean his clock for him.
Then he went away, still screaming; Ben Bova returned to New York; I went to see my mother, established that she was somehow going to pull through, returned to Los Angeles, and sat down to finish writing the pilot script.
This was June already. Or was it July. Things blur.
In any case, it was only weeks away from airdate debut, and they didn’t even have all the principals cast. Not to mention the special effects Trumbull had promised, which weren’t working out; the production staff under the confused direction of Davidson was doing a dandy impression of a Balinese Fire & Boat Drill; Kline, who was still madly dashing about selling something that didn’t exist to people who apparently didn’t care what they were buying... and I was banging my brains out writing “Phoenix Without Ashes,” the opening segment that was to limn the direction of the single most expensive production ever attempted in Canada.
I was also brought up on charges by the Writers Guild for writing during the strike.
I called Marty the agent and threatened him with disembowelment if he ever again called me to say, “Go see Bob Kline.” In my personal lexicon, the word “kline” could be found along with “eichmann,” “dog catcher,” and “rerun.”
But I kept writing. I finished the script and got it off to Canada with only one interruption of note:
The name Norman Klenman had been tossed at me frequently in Toronto by the CTV representative and Davidson and, of course, by Kline and his minions. Klenman, I was told, was the answer to my script problems. He was a Canadian writer who had fled to the States for the larger money, and since he was actually a Canadian citizen who was familiar with writing American series TV, he would be acceptable to the TV board in Ottawa under the terms of “Canadian content” and yet would be a top-notch potential for scripts that didn’t need heavy rewriting. I was too dazed in Toronto to think about Klenman.
But as I sat there in Los Angeles writing my script, I received a call from Mr. Klenman, who was at that moment in Vancouver. “Mr. Ellison,” he said, politely enough, “this is Norman Klenman. Bill Davidson wanted me to call you about The Starlost. I’ve read your bible and, frankly, I find it very difficult and confusing—I don’t understand science fiction—but if you want to train me, and pay me the top-of-the-show money the Guild just struck for, I’ll be glad to take a crack at a script for you.” I thanked him and said I’d get back to him when I’d saved my protagonist from peril at the end of act four.
When I walked off the show, guess who they hired not only as story editor, to replace me, but to rewrite my script, as well. If you guessed Golda Meir, you lose. It was Norman Klenman who “don’t understand science fiction.”
My walkout on my brain child, and all that pretty fame and prettier money was well in the wind by the time of Klenman’s call, but I was still intending to write the scripts I’d contracted for, when the following incidents happened, and I knew it was all destined for the ashcan.
I was in Dallas. Guest of honor at a convention where I was trying to summon up the gall to say The Starlost would be a dynamite series. I was paged in the lobby. Phone call from Toronto. It was Bill Davidson. The conversation describes, better than ten thousand more words by me, what was wrong with the series:
“Major problems, Harlan,” Davidson said. Panic lived in his voice.
“Okay, tell me what’s the matter,” I said.
“We can’t shoot a fifty-mile-in-diameter biosphere on the