Phoenix Without Ashes Read Free Page B

ship.”
    “Why?”
    “Because it looks all fuzzy on the horizon.”
    “Look out the window, Bill. Everything is fuzzy on the horizon.”
    “Yeah, but on TV it all gets muddy in the background. We’re going to have to make it a six-mile biosphere.”
    “Whaaaat?!”
    “Six miles is the best we can do.”
    There is a pivotal element in the pilot script where the hero manages to hide out from a lynch mob. In a fifty-mile biosphere that was possible. In a six-mile biosphere all they’d have to do is link arms and walk across it. “But, Bill, that means I’ll have to rewrite the entire script.”
    “Well, that’s the best we can do.”
    Then, in a blinding moment of satori, I realized, Davidson was wrong, dead wrong. His thinking was so limited he was willing to scrap the logic of the script rather than think it through. “Bill,” I said, “who can tell the difference on a TV screen, whether the horizon is six miles away or fifty? And since we’re showing them an enclosed world that’s never existed before, why shouldn’t it look like that! Shoot de facto six miles and call it fifty; it doesn’t make any damned difference!”
    There was a pause, then, “I never thought of that.”
    Only one indication of the unimaginative, hidebound, and obstinately arrogant thinking that emerged from total unfamiliarity with the subject, proceeded through mistake after mistake, and foundered on the rocks of inability to admit confusion.
    The conversation went on with Davidson telling me that even if Trumbull’s effects didn’t work and they couldn’t shoot a fifty-mile biosphere—after he’d just admitted that it didn’t matter what distance they said they were showing—I’d simply love the set they were building of the control room.
    “You’re building the control room?” I said, aghast with confusion and disbelief. “But you won’t need that till the last segment of the series. Why are you building it now?”
    (It should be noted that one of the Maltese Falcons of the series, one of the prime mysteries, is the location of the control room biosphere. When they find it, they can put the ark back on course. If they find it in the first segment, it automatically becomes the shortest TV series in history.)
    “Because you had it in your bible,” he explained.
    “That was intended to show how the series ended, for God’s sake!” I admit I was screaming at that point. “If they find it first time out, we can all pack our bags and show an hour of recorded organ music!”
    “No, no,” Davidson argued, “they still have to find the backup controls, don’t they?”
    “Aaaaarghh,” I aaaarghhed. “Do you have even the faintest scintilla of an idea what a backup control is?”
    “Uh, no. What is it?”
    “It’s a fail-safe system, you drooling imbecile; it’s what they use if the primary fails. The primary is the control... oh, to hell with it!” I hung up.
    When I returned to Los Angeles, I found matters had degenerated even further. They were shooting a six-mile biosphere and calling it six miles. They said no one would notice the discrepancy in the plot. They were building the control room, with that arrogant ignorance that could not be argued with. Ben Bova, who was the technical adviser, had warned them they were going about it in the wrong way. They nodded their heads... and ignored him.
    Then Klenman rewrote me. Oh boy.
    As an indication of the level of mediocrity they were seeking, “Phoenix Without Ashes” had been retitled, in one of the great artistic strokes of all time, “Voyage of Discovery.” I sent them word they would have to take my name off the show as creator and as writer of that segment. But they would have to use my pseudonym, to protect my royalties and residuals. (They had gang-banged my creation, but I’d be damned if I’d let them profit any further from the rape.)
    Davidson reluctantly agreed. He knew the Writers Guild contract guaranteed me that one last weapon. “What’s