History of My Reading: Alien's Tapdance

 “Intelligence is a friend to that enigmatic light that comes to the world.”--Magritte

“What a dream this place has been.”--The Bee Gees

New Times illustration by  Dickran Palulian.  

My first New Times article, “Bodies in Revolt” appeared in that magazine in March 1975, just in front of an interview with Gena Rowlands, cued to her now hit movie A Woman Under the Influence. That particular issue was notable also for its cover story on the threat of aerosol cans to the ozone layer, an issue about to become a very big one. My story was graced by the illustrations of Dickran Palulian that outlived the article itself as greeting cards.

To produce this piece I read articles on related research and did phone interviews with experts on sleep and biorhythms, as well as lighting and the specific problems in office workplaces caused by unhealthy and distracting heating or cooling. I don’t recall who I interviewed for the narrative portions, about the problems of a Owl in a Lark world or the conflicts the difference could cause in relationships, since I disguised names. But a lot of it was me.

According to research on biological rhythms—a fairly new concept then—Owls (as in night owls) are likely to be physically and psychologically weakest early in the day, and so they are likely to be more stressed in the workplace. It’s pretty much the opposite for Larks, the early birds. Such stress has consequences. I stated my case:

“Individual differences are often treated by employers as illegitimate, as attempts to shirk and cheat. Employees themselves often think of them as abnormal and self-indulgent. We like to think of ourselves as the kind of machines that only need fuel and occasional maintenance to operate at the same level all the time. Biological cycles tell us otherwise…Biorhythms tell us that we are not made of insensitive steel, like desks or lathes. They tell us that we are not dynamos or even computers, but vastly more complex organic mechanisms with processes and subtleties that demand respect.”

Nearly fifty years later, though the reality of Larks and Owls is acknowledged, those demands are still not recognized, let alone met.  More flexibility in scheduling famously existed in certain computer-related workplaces for other reasons, and ergonomics theoretically could apply, but in practice seems to follow a rigid sense of efficiency.

 Nor is much priority or attention given to environmental factors such as lighting, heating etc. that affect individuals in the workplace, even though more is known about the short-term and long-term effects. It could be, however, that the popularity of working from home has a lot to do with biorhythms and these other office environment factors.

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I obtained in fairly short order three other assignments for New Times. One had a similar if now piquant theme—the psychological burdens of the telephone.  This too had a personal origin.

But I was more interested in the other two assignments. One emanated from a lifelong interest. The other came from the movies, and the Orson Welles Complex.

As a concept, even as a word, the future had been magic for me for a long time. From Captain Video and Forbidden Planet to Star Trek; from the Winston Science Fiction novel series at the public library, the Robert Heinlein juvies to the speculative stories in comic book and then print anthologies that went beyond outer space adventures, science fiction had fed the fascination. But by the 1970s, the concept of the actual future had also become more serious, and more present.

That’s partly because the future had become a place of potential disasters: from overpopulation (Paul Eurlich’s The Population Bomb, published in 1968) to the doomsday prospect of Lifeboat Ethics in The Limits to Growth (1972), and more broadly to the impact (psychological and otherwise) of the onslaught of new technologies in Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. Published in 1970, the Toffler book was so popular that its paperback edition was the first to be issued with six different-colored covers.

Books and articles on alarming levels of air, water and soil pollution, as well as environmentalism in general, had also been added to the perennial threat of nuclear war as possible threats to the future itself.

Doom was in the air, but there were also visionaries with ways to meet these challenges and make the future better—Buckminster Fuller being a popular one in the 1970s. Then there was the tantalizing idea of predicting the future.

There were always those who claimed to see the future. In my first years in Cambridge I remember buying annual paperback anthologies of psychic predictions for the following year. I noticed that a lot of these seers forecast the assassination of Fidel Castro. A lot of the prophets also lived in Florida. Years later, when the efforts of the US “intelligence” community to kill Castro by means that included an exploding cigar, it occurred to me that these seers were possibly less connected to psychic vibrations than local CIA agents.

But more than a decade before, Herman Kahn and his cohorts at the Rand Corporation had applied math and computer technology to the possibilities and possible outcomes of thermonuclear war. Their macabre conclusions involving "megadeaths" aside, they came up with two key concepts: how different circumstances in different combinations could lead to “alternative futures,” and that those sets of circumstances could be developed in chains of events they called “scenarios,” which up to that time was a little-used term. By the mid-1970s, these ideas and technologies were being applied to all kinds of alternative futures, and the field of future forecasting was starting to hum.

But for me, the most exciting development—and the biggest impetus to my creating an article proposal—was the trend in something called Future Studies in colleges, universities and even high schools: at least a thousand such courses, including at Harvard and UCLA. By their nature, they tended to be multi-disciplinary, cutting across departments and requiring synthesis as well as analysis. That’s the approach I always wanted to experience when I was a student.

“We cannot humanize the future until we draw it into our consciousness and probe it with all the intelligence and imagination at our command,” wrote Alvin Toffler in the introduction to his 1972 anthology The Futurists. “This is what we are now just beginning to do.”

Toffler listed some of the fields relevant to this inquiry: “anthropology, biology, engineering, philosophy, mathematics, physics, astronomy, sociology, art, economics, history, journalism and a dozen other disciplines.” Uniting them was their major if not sole purpose: the study of the future. This felt like something I was moving towards all my life.

So I attended a symposium on the future at MIT, where I met an advertising copywriter who talked about vector analysis and Gurdjieff, a social scientists who was also a transcendental meditator, and a Harvard Business School student who had spent four years in Vietnam. There was an Israeli physicist, an economist and several biologists who talked about an operating principle common to biology and futurism, that survival during periods of change depends not so much on being well-adapted as on being collectively adaptable.

I discovered that one of the most impressive future studies programs was across the state in Amherst at the University of Massachusetts. It granted not only a bachelor’s degree but a Masters and a PhD in future studies. So in 1975 I went there and met a futures studies student named Fran Koster, who guided me into this new world. (Koster later had a career in environment and the future.) One of the chief books he recommended was Profiles of the Future by Arthur C. Clarke. That book was the gateway to many others, and I was off and running. (The texts that resulted are reprinted at Kowincidence here.)

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Arnie Reisman and David Helpern, Jr. while making
"Hollywood on Trial" 1976. Photo by Elizabeth
Offner.

If that article idea was to be about the future in the present, the other I was pursuing was about a dark aspect of the past coming into the present. And once again, it came from the Orson Welles.

Or at least from someone I met there regularly: David Helpern, who while launching his one-hour film on director Nicholas Ray, was shooting interviews for what would be the first full-length (90 minutes or so) theatrical documentary on the Hollywood Blacklist. Once again he was teamed with producer Jim Gutman, and this time with film editor Frank Galvin (both also veterans of the Orson Welles film school), as well as writer Arnie Reisman.

Beginning with the first "Inquiry into Hollywood Communism" conducted by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in 1947, a period of intense political and cultural repression hit the dream factories: a time of fear, suspicion, doubt and injustice that did not end for nearly twenty years. It destroyed families, friendships, careers, and lives well into the 1950s.

Before it was over it had taken from the screen such talents as John Garfield, Lee Grant, Zero Mostel and hundreds of screenwriters, actors, directors and other artists in film, television and even theatre, as well as some academics and others. In particular, the Blacklist sucked the lifeblood from Hollywood.

I knew little about this, but I wasn't alone in that. Though the Blacklist slowly began losing its teeth until it quietly died out in the early 1960s, Hollywood still had not acknowledged it. There was a sense that this was changing in the mid-1970s.

In addition to closely following the progress of this movie, to be titled Hollywood on Trial, my particular focus became the children of the Blacklist. I interviewed several, including the child of an informer, who buckled to HUAC’s pressure to “name names” of people in Hollywood who had somehow been associated at one time with the U.S. Communist Party (a legal party that participated in elections) or with groups the committee found suspicious (especially those involved in civil rights and civil liberties.) It didn’t matter if the committee already knew the names (as they did in this case.)

Among those I interviewed was Tony Kahn, the son of blacklisted writer Gordon Kahn, who Arnie knew and who later became a well-known broadcaster for NPR and PBS. But I also interviewed his brother Dr. James Kahn, at his house in New Hampshire. He showed me documents suggesting he himself had been blacklisted from a medical position associated with the government, solely because of his father’s blacklisting in the 1940s and 50s.

Buffy Offner, awaiting her scene in the
John Semper student film mentioned later.

It turned out that I also knew a child of the Blacklist. Buffy Offner lived in my building on Columbia Street for a few years, but I got to know her at the Orson Welles Complex, where she worked as a waitress in the bar restaurant. Her father was Mortimer Offner, who’d been a Hollywood screenwriter ( including three movies with his friend Katharine Hepburn), a television producer and a New York theatre director—until the Blacklist wiped out everything.

In addition to my interviews, the footage that Hollywood on Trial shot included interviews with children of the Blacklist. Two children of screenwriters Hugo and Jean Butler, and Dalton Trumbo’s son Chris were filmed around Jean Butler’s dining room table. But the interview that brought the experience home to me aesthetically and emotionally was with Buffy Offner and her younger sister, actress Deborah Offner.

They were filmed sitting on a sofa side by side in the upper West Side apartment where they grew up, and where Debbie was then living. The green shades of their dresses blended softly with the leaves of houseplants behind them, and sunlight through the window illuminated their hair, as they sifted through what their father left: pictures he’d taken as a young portrait photographer of stars such as Sylvia Sidney and Tallulah Bankhead (he was Ethel Barrymore’s favorite photographer, and the famous profile of her in the Barrymore Theatre is by Offner), clippings from his first Broadway hit, an ecstatic letter from the sponsor of his hit television series in 1951 (“A Date with Judy”) and reviews of the last play he directed in New York, the Broadway revival of “Room Service” (which introduced Jack Lemmon.)

Deborah Offner

Then his subpoena to appear before HUAC in 1953 (which absurdly is pink). His show business career then abruptly ended. The next document was a letter lauding the number of insurance policies he’d sold.

Debbie  has been reading and showing the documents, which included a letter describing an earlier hearing that year, while Buffy had a protective arm around her. Both had been very young at the time, though both were aware in some way of what had happened, when their father—who loved show business, and taught them how to do double-takes—suddenly became an insurance man who worked quietly at home. “He loved working in TV,” Buffy recalled. “He talked about it a lot. That was one year. The next year he had nothing.”

There wasn’t much written yet about the Blacklist I could find, but I did have journalist Stefan Kanfer’s history, A Journal of the Plague Years, as well as Dalton Trumbo’s memoir, Additional Dialogue, and Eric Bentley’s 1972 play that reproduced actual HUAC testimony, titled Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been (the beginning of the standard HUAC question) as well as his larger work on the committee, Thirty Years of Treason. But I was especially absorbed in that interview footage.

Several interviews were shot on lush lawns in warm sunshine, as incongruous as a deadly Blacklist in Hollywood. I found that seeing the complete footage of these interviews was very powerful, though only sections of some of them made it into the finished film, and some (like the Offner sisters) not at all. I hope that footage exists somewhere. (Again, the texts resulting from my research into the Blacklist are available at Kowincidence here.)

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So I was working on all three pieces that year, attending a local hearing on the monopolistic practices of Bell Telephone and interviewing people who expressed various forms of disenchantment with the telephone, while also pursuing the future and Blacklist stories.

I probably sent a draft of the future article to my editor Frank Rich (who responded positively) before I took the train down to Washington that summer for the second general assembly of the World Future Society.

Alvin Toffler and Barbara Marx Hubbard during
the WFS convention

Gathered at the Washington Hilton in early June were some 2800 participants: the director of Technological Forecasting of Tel-Aviv University, government planners from Japan and India, and the director of marketing for Hooker Chemicals and Plastics. There were city planners in Hush Puppies, corporate forecasters in khaki suits and university students in cutoff jeans, plus parapsychologists, science fiction buffs, and members of communes dedicated to ecological self-sufficiency. 

Formal sessions explored topics such as long-range economic and environmental planning, new technologies, systems analysis, and the future of religion. The exhibit hall overflowed with future-oriented products from flushless toilets to books on the anthropology of outer space. Discussions continued at coffee shops and restaurants.

Above all, there were the futurist stars. Young visionaries like Stewart Brand and Karl Hess mingled with Alvin Toffler and author Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd), who both roamed the halls between hotel meeting rooms wearing sunglasses. Economist Kenneth Boulding and Roy Amara, head of the Institute of the Future in Menlo Park, California, spoke at sessions. There were four Members of Congress and Senator Edward Kennedy was a featured speaker.  Frances Fitzgerald was there, covering it for Harper's.

But the Assembly took an unexpected and dramatically different turn at the opening press conference. On stage were the elders of the field, including Harvard’s Daniel Bell and Herman Kahn, who’d left RAND and founded the Hudson Institute to research the future beyond nuclear war scenarios. Kahn, who was once an inspiration for Stanley Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, was looking more like a white-bearded Santa Claus. He was speaking softly, gravely and authoritatively about the prosperous future ahead, when the stage was suddenly invaded by an uninvited guest.

It wasn’t a wild-eyed flying saucer abductee or a vegetarian revolutionary but a neatly dressed middle-aged woman. She was Wilma Scott Heide, a past president of the National Organization of Women. Standing on a stage filled exclusively by white men, she made the point she spoke about: the future the Assembly discussed apparently didn’t have any women in it. Specifically, it had not one woman among the main speakers.

The ironies were many. The women’s movement had been making headlines (and disrupting male bastions) since 1970. So an organization dedicated to forward thinking was having its feminist crisis several years after everybody else. Anticipating it wouldn’t have required systems analysis, just reading the newspaper.

Moreover, Alvin Toffler and presumably others had noted that women and people of color were underrepresented at the first Assembly four years before, but nothing had been done about it. The Assembly leadership at first tried to respond by shooing her off the stage, until the audience protested. She finished to applause and some conciliatory mumbles. But the real response came later.

That night a women’s caucus was formed, and assembly leaders were persuaded to add a woman as a main speaker. She spoke the very next morning, and apart from being the hit of the convention, she changed its entire emphasis. She brought another kind of futurism to the forefront.

She was Hazel Henderson, an economist with an interest in ecology, and an advisor to the Office of Technology Assessment. Born in England and retaining a British accent, she was tall, blond, and charismatic, and she galvanized her audience. 

She told them that she wasn't interested in developing strategies and scenarios. "I have humbler goals. They are to open up processes and decision mechanisms, to expose underlying values and assumptions buried deeply in our so-called value-free methodologies.”

“Citizens now understand that professionals with narrow, specialist training cannot adequately define our problems,” she continued. “Not that professionals aren't essential to the debate, but they must now see where the limits of their technical competence end, and”—the key phrase—“where their values carry no more weight than those of any other citizen in a democracy."

Hazel Henderson was instantly the new star of the convention, and her message inspired a fierce energy and focus for the rest of the proceedings. No one from the World Future Society had predicted this. But her clarion call for a kind of participatory or democratic futurism engaged not only in exploring alternative futures but “desirable futures” changed the following days.  

I did some quick interviews, collected transcripts and press releases, observed a lot and had coffee with Frances Fitzgerald. When I got back to Cambridge I quickly re-wrote my article to include some of what had happened and what I learned at the Assembly, and sent it off to New Times. By then I’d also finished and sent in my telephone piece.

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Walter Bernstein, Martin Ritt on set of "The Front"

Come the autumn it was back to the Blacklist, for Hollywood on Trial wasn’t the only movie being shot about those dark days. The other was The Front, a major studio feature film directed by veteran director Martin Ritt from a script by movie and television veteran Walter Bernstein. Both had been blacklisted.

The movie mostly followed a blacklisted screenwriter (played by Woody Allen, in his only role in a movie he didn’t write or direct) and a blacklisted comic actor (played by Zero Mostel, who had been blacklisted.) The title comes from the practice of some blacklisted writers to employ a “front,” or a person who pretended to have written their script. They got screen credit, and sometimes showed up for script conferences. Some got carried away. A lot of rueful blacklist comedy ensued in real life, and Bernstein drew on his own experiences as well as others.

Most of the movie was shot in New York, except for a sequence at a mountain resort in western Massachusetts, where I spent a day observing and doing my own interviews, along with a crew from Hollywood on Trial. I’m pretty sure I caught a ride out there with Fred Barron, a former Boston After Dark/Phoenix colleague and friend, who may have been representing the Real Paper, but I remember for sure riding back with him. He’d also become friends with David Helpern.

We were present for a scene in which Zero Mostel (playing a writer/performer named Hecky Brown) was finishing his nightclub act, which he was performing for a fraction of his pre-Blacklist fee because it was the only work he could get.

Later there would be a scene in which the night club owner pays Hecky even less—something that had really happened to Zero Mostel. But the scene we saw was wondrous. We watched Zero Mostel sing, crack jokes, do sight gags and otherwise resurrect his 1940s nightclub act. There were a number of takes but Mostel made sure to do something different each time, so the audience of extras would really laugh. He kept getting funnier.

It was a bizarre scene. The young extras from New York, dressed for a night out in the 1950s at 7 in the morning, mixed with hotel guests, many of them visiting members of the National Hebrew Association and the Medical Center of Denver. It looked like the last remains of a junior prom held at an old folk’s home.

I interviewed Walter Bernstein, who was warm and funny, and several others on the set with connections to the Blacklist, including two who were children: Julie Garfield (who had a small acting part) and her brother David Garfield (a production assistant), the children of blacklisted actor John Garfield. John Garfield was a big star in the 1940s, and one of the worst victims of the Blacklist, condemned for signing a few petitions and attending a few parties with the wrong people.

“My father wasn’t a leader in the thinking department, but he was curious,” David Garfield told me. “When his best friends turned against him, it broke his heart. One minute he was a star, the next people were crossing the street to avoid him. I really believe it killed him.”

Later, in between set-ups in another part of the building, director Martin Ritt talked to me, saying that though the movie had started out to be more of a comedy, it was getting more serious as they went on, and morally tougher. He wanted the movie to be entertaining but “At my age I don’t have too many more films to make, I want them to be serious.” (In a few years he would make probably his most famous film, Norma Rae.)

In his rumpled blue jumpsuit, Martin Ritt was totally present in his conversation with me, and I was concentrating on him completely. But I suddenly realized that things around us had gone quiet, and when I looked beyond him I was startled and then amazed to see that everyone working on this large set was motionless and looking at us, waiting for the director to start the scene. I was holding up the progress of a Hollywood movie. Awed and a little shaken, I quickly wound up the interview.

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My moviegoing in Cambridge continued, most of the time alone.  I still spent hours at the Orson Welles Cinema and sitting in its lobby, subsisting on coffee, popcorn and licorice. Part of my social life consisted in talking to the people I knew when they came to see movies there.  I also once spotted Faye Dunaway skulking along the lower lobby (she was then in a relationship with a Boston rock and roller), trying so conspicuously not to be recognized that it was obviously her.  

In March 1974, my friend and former colleague at the Boston Phoenix, Kerry Gruson, had been attacked by a deranged Vietnam vet in Hawaii when she was on her way to Vietnam as a reporter.  The attack left her partially paralyzed.  We hadn't parted on the best of terms but when I heard what happened I wrote an encouraging letter to her.  Apparently others we knew had abandoned her, although her family was completely with her. But I hadn't seen her until one evening in the Orson Welles lobby, when there she was in her wheelchair, accompanied by an unfamiliar young man.  As far as I knew she was still in New York, so it was a shock, as was my first sight of her condition.  We spoke warmly but briefly, after which I retreated to the men's room very shaken .

I later visited her once at a rehab facility in New York State and we kept in touch by letter and phone for the next 15 years or so.  She had moved to Florida and in 2024, despite a worsened condition, she is a principal in a nonprofit, ThumbsUp International, dedicated to positive change, mostly through participatory sports that include the disabled.   

Pat Mitchell

In addition to my own cinema outings, I occasionally accompanied Janet Maslin to films she was reviewing, especially in the dodgier parts of town. Probably through Janet, I met the new entertainment reporter at the Boston television station WBZ, Pat Mitchell. Her list of credits and awards since then is enormous, including as head of PBS. But this was her first job in TV journalism, as part of that first major wave of women on camera. I went to a few movies with her, after which we sped to the TV station so she could write and deliver her review for the 11 O’Clock news.

Once on the ride to the station she asked me what I thought of the film and then stopped me after a few sentences, saying that’s what she thought as well, so she didn’t want my words to get mixed up with hers. Writing a review as quickly as she did amazed me. She would show me her script before air time—that second pair of eyes. This was my first look at a TV newsroom before and during a broadcast.

One evening after the broadcast she took me to a restaurant and bar in Boston where show business people hung out, including famous performers making local appearances. We wound up seated near the table of Maggie Smith and her companion. In person in 1975, Maggie Smith was breathtakingly beautiful, and I found myself envious of those empathetic eyes trained on her older male companion.

While Pat and I talked at a very late hour we could hear someone playing piano and singing above the din. I thought he sounded a lot like Joel Grey, famous for his recent role in the stage and film versions of Cabaret. A few minutes later when we got up to leave, I was astonished to see that in fact it was Joel Grey.

That year I was especially inspired by a new book I read: The Lives of the Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher by Lewis Thomas. These eloquent essays illustrate the interdependence of life at every scale, beyond the categories that limit our understanding. The human body as a cooperative, symbiotic medley of lifeforms, human intelligence as located in the body beyond the brain, the permeable definitions of organism and superorganism—these and other themes were largely new, and not only to the general public. But fifty years later, they are becoming the basis for new understanding of life on Earth. In its quiet (though best-selling) way, this has to be one of the most important books of the twentieth century.

That book in turn inspired me to write in a form I don’t think I’d attempted since college: stage plays. I wrote three short plays designed to be performed on the same evening on basically the same set that I called After Dining at Googolplex. One was about the relationship of a man and a computer. Long before AI or even home computers, these were still the days of the big mainframes. I used to get Carol’s brother Raymond to bring me back computer printouts from M.I.T. just so I could see what the language looked like.

My play involved an expert summoned to diagnose an experimental computer that had stopped functioning. As a younger and more idealistic man, this expert had passed many nights reading to the computer. Eventually the computer began repeating back quotes to him from those nights: lines from D.H. Lawrence, Thoreau, Jean Cocteau, William Blake, Jung and John Cage, as well as Carl Sagan, Jacob Bronowski, Lewis Thomas etc. The expert, now compromised, discouraged and disenchanted with his life, gradually recognizes them, and wonders why the computer is saying them to him, and only him.

The other two plays (one set in a bedroom, in which the television is a character) also riffed on these same authors, especially Thomas, in contemporary stories. The premises of these plays were creative and ahead of their time; the execution of them however was much less successful. Today they seem pretty much unplayable.

I continued to write pages for my college novel that year, and started a revision, but it was getting unwieldy, the chapters I sent out elicited no interest, and I couldn’t get a handle on it anymore. So in some frustration I dropped it for awhile, and sometime in 1975 I started something completely different.

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I made collages as title pages, which I've
lost track of.  This old photocopy remains.

For this fiction project, titled “Alien’s Tapdance,” I did pretty much the opposite of what I tried to do with the novel: I wrote spontaneously, based on contemporary experience, and the style was bolder, more experimental in places, reflecting more directly the surrealist writings and art in my books and on my walls, while also influenced by the films I was seeing. I used collage (including visual collages); I even tried a brief section using Burrough’s cut-up method.

I started with a fictional version of the Orson Welles Complex and Cambridge as the main settings, but as I kept writing and adding other sections (such as the first person “Confessions of a Popcorn Fiend”) the Complex became itself a subject, as well as the form (as if each of three sections was a movie playing in one of the theatres.)

The end result was A Night At The Complex, nearly 100 single-spaced pages, which I photocopied and distributed to people I knew there (and yes, I was aware of the triple meaning in the title, and the allusion to A Night At The Opera was intentional.) It created a little buzz in the building. Reading it now, I recognize an early DeLillo influence in the style. It became, by default, the most sustained and finished work of long fiction I had accomplished.

The third part of my Complex fiction involved the fictional making of a film by people that worked and hung out there. The urge to get beyond just exhibiting and watching movies to making them was widely shared. Larry Jackson was assembling a documentary on the making of classic Warner Brothers cartoons, featuring Bugs Bunny and other cartoons from the 1940s. It was released in December 1975 as Bugs Bunny: Superstar, the first of many collections of these cartoons and films about them. Terry Corey also worked on the release of this project.  Larry would become a producer and movie executive in Hollywood.

Meanwhile, John Semper, another young OW Cinema employee I knew, was making a student film using people from the Complex as actors (among them, Buffy Offner) as well as in creative and technical capacities. Semper would go on to a career as a screenwriter and story editor, notably for Spider-Man: the Animated Series.

And even while completing Hollywood on Trial, David Helpern was looking ahead to finding a feature film project. We discussed books we liked that I would adapt, such as Don DeLillo’s End Zone, J.P. Donleavy’s The Ginger Man (which got as far as a phone conversation between Donleavy and Helpern during which the author explained why he wasn’t selling the film rights to anyone) and Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions—which for a blissful moment looked like it might happen, until a bigger bid for the film rights took it away.

(A film version of Breakfast of Champions was finally made—in 1999. It wasn’t very good and didn’t do well. In the book’s introduction Vonnegut wrote about how his plays had failed because they didn’t include his voice. The novel was replete with his voice—and I wasn’t planning on making the mistake of eliminating it, as the 1999 film did.)

At some point David had mentioned that the two local alternative weeklies, the Phoenix and the Real Paper, might make a good subject for an original script. Maybe I was still too close to both the complexity and the traumas associated with my experiences with them, but I didn’t immediately seize on the idea.

Some months later, director Joan Micklin Silver came to the Orson Welles with her first feature, Hester Street (which went on to success, with its star, Carol Kane, nominated for an Oscar.) I was included among those invited to share a meal with the Silvers at the Restaurant. Also present were David Helpern and Fred Barron.

One of the topics of table conversation I remember (possibly because I started it) requires some historical explanation involving two outside events that dominated the news that year. After a bloody and chaotic decade, American troops had withdrawn from Vietnam in March 1973 as a result of the Paris peace treaty, but fighting continued throughout 1974 between North and South Vietnam. By spring 1975 the victory of the North was complete.

The other was the Watergate scandal and the surrounding events in Washington, which were unlike any other in memory. That tumult had absorbed us since early 1973. I was among those who obsessively watched the televised Senate hearings into the Watergate break-in and coverup in May 1973, and then the televised hearings the bipartisan House committee considering the impeachment of President Nixon in the summer of 1974, at the end of which anguished Republicans as well as Democrats voted to send three articles of impeachment to the House floor. But before the House could consider them, President Nixon resigned on August 8, 1974.

The reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had covered the Watergate story from its beginning in 1972, and in 1974 their first book on the subject was published, All The President’s Men. By 1975 the movie version had been announced, and particularly among film obsessives a popular game was debating which actors should play which real-life characters. (I’d made my own semi-serious list, proposing Jack Palance as Nixon, Broderick Crawford as attorney-general John Mitchell, Orson Welles as Senator Sam Ervin and Peter Sellers as Henry Kissinger. It turned out that none of these figures was ever seen in the movie.  My only choice that actually came true was Robert Redford as Bob Woodward.) So this was a topic of table conversation with Joan Silver, which she joined enthusiastically.

We also talked about the much talked-about movie version of The Great Gatsby, again with Robert Redford. Joan Silver said she would have flipped the two male leads, so that Bruce Dern would play Jay Gatsby and Robert Redford the callous, wealthy husband of Gatsby’s love object, Daisy Buchanan. I thought that was a fascinating idea, and I could see the difference it would make, even if the chances of it ever happening in Hollywood seemed slim.

I left after the thoroughly enjoyable meal. Only later did I learn that David and Fred stayed behind to discuss a feature film story with Silver—about an alternative newspaper in Boston. I didn’t know David had talked about this idea with Fred, and I don’t know what was in writing at that point, but eventually they were both credited with the story, and Fred Barron with the script.

It became Silver’s next project. Initially titled Alternative Lives (I read several early drafts), it came to be called Between the Lines, now known for introducing an astonishing number of young actors (including John Heard, Lindsay Crouse, Jeff Goldblum, Jill Eikenberry and Bruno Kirby, plus Stephen Collins, Marilu Henner and others) who went on to prominent Hollywood careers. 

Silver eventually filmed at least some of it in Cambridge and Boston. Several Orson Welles Cinema people worked on it, as their first jobs in the movies. OW Cinema manager Mary Galloway was a location manager, and Martha Pinson was a production assistant, who got interested in the work of the script supervisor. In any case, Mary soon moved to LA and Martha became a prominent New York-based script supervisor for major directors like Martin Scorsese and Sydney Lumet, and more recently she directed the award-winning feature Tomorrow.

Though there was nothing particularly nefarious about David and Fred pitching this movie without mentioning to me that they'd been working on it, and I remained friends with both of them, it seemed not only a lost opportunity but another piece of evidence that despite my regular presence I was still at the fringes of things.

                 *                                                *                                      *

closing time at the Orson Welles bar.  Photo by Frank Siteman

I am the Alien. I am not one of you. How do you know until you know who we are? Listen: I know. So says the protagonist of Alien’s Tapdance, an “astropologist” from another world. The alienated alien, shades of Mr. Spock, was my internal persona as well as, I thought, my external appearance. I felt like an alien from a startled world, nearby in space and time perhaps, but in another slightly different dimension of being. I was more observer than participant, or at least that’s how I felt---both there and at a distance.

And it was hard not to see it that way. One afternoon I was having coffee with David in the Orson Welles bar when someone—I think it was Nat Segaloff, who at the time I believe was doing publicity for Boston’s big cinema chain—came hurrying in, and asked David to join him outside for a photo someone was taking in front of the Welles Cinema. Larry, Terry and Myron Meisel (who’d been the writer on David’s Nick Ray film) were waiting. Nat said something to the effect that someday people would marvel that the five of them had started out in the same place at the same time. I was not invited or included.

It was just a moment but it came to mean something, more to me than probably to anyone else involved. In fact, all five of them went on to careers in and around Hollywood, at least for a time. (However, as writer and producer of two hit television comedy series, a producer of a major motion picture and a later career in British television, Fred Barron eventually eclipsed them all.)

On one level that moment just amused and also insulted me, but on another it fed my doubts. It hadn’t escaped me that many of my colleagues in Boston had attended Harvard and Brandeis and other high-powered universities, and came from solidly middle class if not upper middle class or wealthy families. In day to day work and relationships it didn’t matter. I didn’t discern that I was treated any differently, and I didn’t feel any less intelligent or talented.

But they seemed to know things I didn’t know, like how to succeed or at least survive in the worlds that interested us all. I’d made it this far on talent and luck but my sudden progress had stalled, at least in terms of making a living, of assembling a career.

I was not the only one ambivalent about this career-building business, but somehow they managed to make the right moves. When I came up against unfavorable circumstances and my own limitations, I didn’t have family contacts or old school ties or other networks, or any experiences to draw from: I was not brought up nor educated anywhere near the worlds in which I was trying to navigate a life.

I sensed also that my friends were moving into long-term relationships and marriages with partners who coincidentally would help them in their ambitions. I was nowhere near that: practically, financially, emotionally.

When I started writing for Boston After Dark, everything was equal and sui generis. I never thought about my future, other than to dream of publishing novels and other books, of making records, writing plays and movies. Within a few years, however, much to my surprise though maybe not to the surprise of others, the mainstream media outlets that we scorned and that had scorned us, started to raid our editorial offices. The first I was aware of was the BAD film critic John Koch, who was hired for that same position at the august Boston Globe. (John and his wife Sharon remained my friends while I was in Cambridge.)

It took a few years more, but eventually the alternative papers became proving grounds for mainstream media jobs. Janet Maslin juggled gigs at Seventeen, Cosmopolitan, New Times and elsewhere even while she was still at the Phoenix. But shortly after Frank Rich was recruited by Time, Janet got the film critic position at Newsweek. When several years later she moved to the New York Times, she was replaced at Newsweek by the Real Paper’s critic, David Ansen, and shortly after that, Frank Rich became the chief drama critic of the Times. And so on, for decades.

Apart from considerations of experience and whatever qualified as qualifications, I didn’t especially want that kind of specialization, or what I perceived as the straitjacket of those institutions. I also doubted I could handle it.

 I knew the path most suited to me was the one I was more or less on—of writing on various subjects for magazines until I hit on something I could write a book about. Or even if I was luckier, I might find a novel among my pages and plans. 

 But maybe I didn’t have the right skills for success. I probably didn’t have the right attitude either, for the world symbolized by Cambridge and New York and Hollywood. My attempts to make a life work must be individual and improvised: my alien’s tapdance.

My doubts were underlined by financial and professional realities. Towards the end of the year, my telephone story had been edited and scheduled for publication in a December issue of New Times, as “Fear of Phoning.” It’s interesting now to note how much of a love-hate relationship many people had with telephones even in the 70s—their intrusive demands, their phony-ness (it’s where the word comes from), how people talked on the phone and ignored the person standing there, etc. But reading it now, I recognize the people I interviewed and gave disguised names. Apart from expert testimony, many of the interviews were conducted in the Orson Welles bar, and several with Complex employees.

It’s interesting now to notice how the subject of these articles reflected aspects of my own alien-ness—for example as a Night Owl and telephone-phobic introvert—while practically pleading for the world to make a place for me.

But my future studies piece was in trouble, chiefly because my editor Frank Rich left New Times to become the film critic for Time Magazine—in those days still a powerful and prestigious position. A new editor was assigned to me, and we never really saw eye to eye on much of anything. My revisions, and revisions of those revisions, didn’t meet with anyone’s enthusiasm at the magazine. I could see the writing on the wall for the Blacklist piece as well, and it too was ultimately rejected.

Having devoted so much time to these pieces, I was behind in my bills and behind in my rent, and now with no active publishing relationships. I still had a little money coming in, but it would go fast—if I remained in Cambridge.

I can’t completely reconstruct my thoughts and feelings at that point. But my notebooks suggest that I felt too caught up in the emotional turmoil of others to deal with my own. Emotional noise combined with a strange loneliness. At this remove I can see how busy and complicated and depleting that year had been, especially in the lack of immediate results of all that energy and effort.  It did not feel like the ordinary rhythm of ups and downs that it probably was, and there was no one to counsel me.  But in any case I didn't feel I had the resources (financial and otherwise) to weather the storm.

So beyond the emotional confusion was the intuition that to move forward I needed to take a step back, conserve my resources, and be ready. After all, I could write anywhere, and travel from anywhere.

I’d been thinking about quitting Cambridge for some time, to the point of figuring out what to take and what to leave behind. Then I just decided to do it. I can’t say what role my mother’s death played in all this, or the letters that kept coming from family and friends after my two months back home, or even the time I spent there, but that was my rent-free option. My youngest sister Debbie and her new husband Jerry would drive up in a covered pickup truck to take me back to my family home in Greensburg.

I packed up, gave stuff away. I stripped my blue walls of the representations of my Cambridge life: the arts prints—Magritte, Picasso, Ernst, Klee, etc.—the clipped cartoons (mother and father observing their son at the typewriter as the mother says: “Good news! It’s not a novel. It’s economic theory”; another with a middle aged man in a suit telling his office secretary, “my tragedy is I joined the surrealist movement too late”), the poster of the Marx Brothers with a photo of Einstein, the drawing of the god Janus (who looks both ways, to the future and the past), movie stills, a photo of Kirk and Spock in the transporter room, a Paris cafe photo allegedly of Brigitte Bardot by Cartier Bresson, several child drawings, most of them by my niece Chrissy.

I left my excellent work table and my beautiful dark wood bed to friends, gathered my three cats and of course my books and records, and then suddenly I was gone, breathing out at the dark highway.