Originally published March 7, 1997, in Comics Buyer’s Guide #1216
While Harlan Ellison was busy putting fans in their place, I was busy being put in mine.
Harlan started quite a stir during his opinion piece on the Sci-Fi Channels Sci-Fi Buzz. Ellison stated that writers “owe” fans nothing beyond their best endeavors at plying their craft. Writers who receive wide fan support do not owe the fans any sense of gratitude for “putting” the writers where they are; the writers owe their relative success entirely to their own efforts.
Although many fans understood what Ellison was saying, others angrily accused Ellison of not giving a dámņ about the fans, of not showing proper deference or allegiance to those who had been loyal to his efforts. I think a few folks also managed to place him at the grassy knoll when JFK went down.
(On a roll, Harlan also went on Politically Incorrect and—in a performance that had friends of his screaming at the screen, “You have a heart condition, for crying out loud, calm down!” —had to have his teeth pried out of the throat of Starr Jones, an ultra-conservative legal commentator who was endeavoring to defend the 1950s practice of turning rat and knuckling under to the communist witch-hunt mentality. It wasn’t the most offbeat PI confrontation of the year—that would be Chevy Chase going mental on Steven Bochco—but it was way up there. Boy, I’d love to go on that show.)
Meantime, in less rarefied atmospheres, I was interested in seeing the John Travolta film Michael. Newspaper ads indicated that members of the Writers Guild of America (which I happen to be) would be admitted free to any showing upon presentation of their WGA card. This is not an uncommon practice, particularly as Oscar nomination time approaches.
It’s a perk, I admit it. C’mon—someone offers you a chance to see a free movie that’s gotten good notices, are you going to turn it down? Besides, I’d been working fairly non-stop on several tight deadlines, including a series of Star Trek novels. I figured I was entitled to a break.
So I went to my local theater. I deliberately chose a performance that I knew would be lightly attended, because the last time I’d used my WGA card (at another theater) it had taken a minute or two as I signed off on a form, and I didn’t want to hold up other folks. With no one in line behind me, I dutifully presented my WGA card and said I wanted a ticket for Michael.
The ticket seller stared at me. “What’s this?” she asked.
“It’s my WGA card.”
“What’s the WGA?”
I tapped the card. “Writers Guild of America. I’m a writer.”
“Why are you giving me this?”
“Well,” I said patiently, “ the newspaper ad says that WGA members are admitted free to any showing of Michael.”
“What newspaper?”
My spider-sense was tingling. “Newsday,” I said.
She stared at me. “I don’t know anything about it.” And she stood there.
Apparently she belonged to that subset of individuals who believe that, if they don’t know about something, it doesn’t exist. Me, I was kicking myself that I hadn’t brought a copy of the paper with me. It hadn’t occurred to me. I mean, you bring a newspaper to the bathroom, or to a doctor’s waiting room, or something like that. Who brings a newspaper to the movies?
“There was an ad for Michael in the paper, and it said that WGA members would be admitted free to any performance upon presentation of their card. Does anyone here have a paper?”
“Hold on,” she said, and picked up a phone. She got the manager on the phone and started muttering a summation of what I’d said, with attendant skepticism in her tone. I sensed that people had wandered in behind me. I shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other. I hadn’t wanted to make a big deal about this. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t afford to plunk down for a ticket. They’d made an offer and all I wanted to do was take advantage of it.
She turned to me, phone still to her ear, and said, “The manager doesn’t know anything about it.”
“Does the manager have a newspaper?”
“I don’t know.”
At which point, my attitude was, The hëll with it, I’ll just pay for it. Nothing in my life comes easily anyway; might as well pay my way.
And then the guy behind me, a beefy guy who looked to be in about his mid-50s, started saying loudly to the cashier—in that way someone has when they’re more interested in showing how tough they are than actually conveying information—“Think you could make some time for a paying customer?”
Chucking a thumb at my fan, I said to the ticket seller, “Could you sell him a ticket, please?”
But she was too engrossed in listening to the manager apparently reiterating his or her cluelessness. She listened to the phone a moment more, than said to me, “What are you, again?”
It’s not everyone who can take a simple trip to the movies and turn it into an exercise in self-humiliation, but I often manage to succeed in endeavors where lesser mortals might fail. “I am a writer,” I said, adding silently, of stuff.
“He says he’s a writer,” said the ticket seller, and then turned back to me and said, “My manager doesn’t know anything about writers getting—”
“Fine, I’ll buy a ticket,” I said, yanking out my wallet and just wanting to be done with it.
And as I was saying that, my fan from behind—apparently not hearing my stated intention to purchase admission—said loudly to the ticket seller, “C’mon, lady, make some time for somebody who works for a living.”
Works for a living.
I thought about the deadlines I struggled to meet, the days making time for my kids and the nights spent working until 3 a.m. The finishing up of 20 pages of scripting, getting caught up, only to see the fax machine suddenly start pumping through another ten pages, pushing me behind again. The deadlines for the novels, the weekly grind of the column, the exhaustion, the constant struggle of staring at the computer screen day after day, and y’know, every time I turn on the computer, the screen’s always blank. It has yet to come glowing to life with a story already existing there. I thought about the weeks, months I’d spent away from home working on Space Cases, getting to the studio by 8 a.m., leaving at 8 p.m., working at night—either script rewrites or comic book work—until I fell over and then getting up the next day and doing it all over again.
And I grabbed the ticket out of the ticket seller’s hand and rounded on the guy, and snapped, “I work sixteen hour days, hotshot. What’s your work schedule like?”
He glowered at me, his wife next to him. Probably he would have loved to start something, but with his wife standing right there, I guess he felt hesitant. He said nothing. I stood there for a moment, and then turned on my heel and headed to the theater.
And I sat and watched the film, smoldering through much of it, and thinking that it was pretty much okay except that it would have been a better film if they’d gotten Samuel L. Jackson for the William Hurt part, because Hurt was supposed to play a cynic, but he’s too bland to be a good cynic.
I’ll tell you, though…
You go to conventions, and people line up for your autograph, or gather to hear you speak, and laugh at your jokes, and praise your work. It insulates you and even makes you think that perhaps that’s how the entire world views you.
I’ve written before, though, that the general public tends to think of writers in a less-than-lofty capacity, except perhaps for marquee names like Grisham or King. But I’ve never quite had it laid out for me quite as starkly as this: Make some time for somebody who works for a living.
Writers are always being judged. One would think that it goes with the territory, but to my way of thinking, the only thing that goes with the territory is having one’s work being judged. But sometimes that’s almost beside the point. It is writers themselves who are always being held up for scrutiny. If fans don’t like the writer’s latest offering, then the writer supposedly doesn’t care or just hacked it out. Or—here’s my favorite—a writer takes on a job “just because he wants to make money.” And in doing so, the writer is somehow diminished or a lesser being, having sacrificed a sacred trust or spit upon expectations. Hëll, remember when Dave Sim had to tell everyone he was giving the money for writing an issue of Spawn to charity because fans were screaming he’d “sold out”?
What an insane, unfair attitude that is for readers to have. If I said that the majority of people in this country take a job, first and foremost, to pay bills, I think I’d be on solid ground. If you stood at a construction site and said disdainfully to a bricklayer, “You only took this job to feed your family; you are therefore a sell-out,” the bricklayer would bounce a brick off your skull.
Writers are constantly being crucified on the cross of others’ expectations. There are the people who hold writers to their own interpretation of the artistic ideal, which apparently includes the notion that filthy considerations such as money or worrying about paying bills should never enter into the writer’s personal radar. At the same time, there are others (such as my fan) who feel that writers are dilettantes, dabblers, engaging in an endeavor that has no relevance to the real world. That writers just sit around making stuff up and people are actually dumb enough to give them money for it.
The writer and his audience: an ongoing love/hate relationship. A delicate balance. On the one hand there is the writer, working to gain the reader’s trust in that constantly dicey proposition called “suspension of disbelief.” And on the other, there is the reader who basically says, “I have given you that trust; that obligates you to me.” It’s a mercurial thing, though, that trust. All trust is. For all that the writer elevates himself or is elevated by the readers, ultimately we’re all just magicians pulling tricks out of our hats. Dancers tapping as fast as we can, sweat pouring down our brows until such time that we fail to entertain, at which point the audience will turn away, toss us aside, forgotten. There are periods where a writer can do no wrong—and then, just as quickly, suddenly he feels as if he can do no right.
What is the writer’s job? To engage the reader. What is the writer’s obligation? To survive. It’s no more and no less involved than that.
But hey—it beats working for a living.
(Peter David, writer of stuff, can be written to at Second Age, Inc., PO Box 239, Bayport, NY 11705. He just looked at the ad for Adventures in the DC Universe. Is it his imagination, or is this the first time that Captain Marvel has looked “right” in years?)
• 
It would be even funnier if the angry guy in line makes a living writing up reports and spreadsheets. None of which have any relevance after the end of the current quarter (3 months maximum).
As an accountant who puts in a lot of hard hours, I take offense to that comment.
I know the feeling of working in an industry with baggage. People think that just because you work in a sheltered workshop, you have the IQ of a carrot. My advice, stick to your phasers and do you things your way.
I do have a modicum of sympathy for the ticket seller. I work in the theatre industry as a Box Office manager, and, on more than one occasion, the marketing dept. has put out special offers for show tickets without informing the box office. That can be very annoying, and embarassing.
“… Starr Jones, an ultra-conservative legal commentator…”
Boy, does that look weird now.
All artists are too lazy to get real jobs and do real work. That’s the mainstream mindset when they want to bìŧçh about something relating to an artist of any kind. Having worked when off duty as overtime security on film sets in my area, I always find the slings and arrows about actors not really working and getting paid to play all day funny. Most people I know would call it quits by hour two of some things I’ve seen actors have to do on film sets for five and six hours at a time.
Same with writers. I really don’t think most people engage their brains long enough to realize what work it really is to write for a living; especially for good writers who care about their craft enough to do things like serious research and study around the topic of their story. Everyone remembers that they wrote a story about a sea monster when they were in the third grade, so it must be easy to do.
I wonder how much the guy in the line would have enjoyed the movie he was so anxious to watch if no writers had worked on it?
As a teacher, I know exactly what you just went through. We don’t work for a living either and we get summers off to boot (of course I don’t get paid for those months, but then what do I know about working…).
I still remember meeting you several years ago at a convention in NC where you told how you would design a space ship with the self destruct button right next to the escape pod, unlike how they did it in Alien. It was the highlight of the convention.
1 – Harlan is right. It’s asinine to think ANY artist is somehow obligated to you. Even if I feel that a writer has failed to produce work that engages me, the rational thing to do is giving a shot at the work of other writers. The problem is that a lot of fans really treat artists sort of like imaginary friends, or worse, messiahs.
2 – Some people are just dumb. They make the false correlation that writing professionaly is just the same as them sitting and goofing off while writing some anecdote that they will send thru e-mail. Just on a slightly larger scale. One day I was casually talking to a guy in the bus, and he asked me why I never trying being a writer, since he felt that I had a lot of imagination and was well-read. I told him that being a writer required a lot of patience, dedication, you had to do a lot of research, etc. and I couldn’t be bothered to do all that. Most people think that you only need a little imagination and culture, and you’re all set to go and be a writer.
.
William Hurt can’t play a cynic? Did you ever watch BROADCAST NEWS?
Peter: Apparently she belonged to that subset of individuals who believe that, if they don’t know about something, it doesn’t exist.
Luigi Novi: Been there.
Years ago, when I was still recruiting for the test screenings of films conducted for the company I work for, it was difficult recruiting for a screening in Manhattan when it was cold, because almost none of the theater managers in Manhattan let me recruit in their lobby, even when the friggin’ screening was going to be held there. On several occasions some even tried (unsuccessfully) to bully me away recruiting in front of their theater, even though I was in no way impeding pedestrian traffic into the theater or in front of it. The manager of the Angelika even tried to explain to me that the thinking of the management is that those people who accept an invitation for our screenings, which are almost always held on weeknights, would have otherwise have paid to see one of the films shown by the theater. (Putting aside the fact that our clients pay for every single seat when they rent out the auditorium, and jack up concession sales during a screening, since weeknights tend to be less busy, this is false, since those people would likely not have gone to the theater that night, and only do so because they have a free pass to a film they want to see that doesn’t come out for months, or even a year.) One manager in upstate New York even called the cops. That manager presumably got a lesson in how public sidewalks work from the cop who showed up, who certainly didn’t do anything to me. The one exception was the Loews Kips Bay, a lovely, modern multiplex with a spacious lobby that included benches, a cafe with those little round high-tables, etc. The management were supercool to me, allowing me to recruit there whenever the screening was either there, or at another Loews theater. There was also a nice Borders bookstore next door, and a Petco filled with adorable kittens on the other side.
Then AMC bought Loews.
When I showed up there one night, ready to recruit for a screening that we were actually having there, at Kips Bay, the new District Manager or something was there, and the theater’s general manager, Ruben, told me that this might be a problem. Having worked for Loews myself in the past (it’s how I discovered the market research company who conducted the screenings I later ended up recruiting for) I asked if I could talk to the DM. I explained to him that we were having a test screening there the following week.
His answer?
“Well, I’ve never heard of that.”
I didn’t know what to make of this. Okay, so this District Manager of the largest theater chain in the country never heard of market research. Or test screenings of films. Or renting out auditoriums for private use. Or something. I don’t know.
So I explained it to him.
“Well, I’ve never heard of that.”
Well, I figured, you could look in your computer to see the auditorium reservation, y’know. And in any event, what difference does it make? I’m telling you about it now, aren’t I? I can show you the invitations that I have on me, can’t I? You can ask the General Manger, who’s known me for some time, as have the other managers here, can’t you? They can vouch that I work for a company that often has screenings here and at other Loews theaters, right?
But it didn’t matter.
The client pays the theater for the auditorium’s rental, and they really didn’t give a šhìŧ about the little guys like me who are lower on the totem pole than dirt, and it’s not like they or my bosses were going to demand that access to the theater’s lobby was going to have to be a condition, and even if they did, the theater would probably have told them to what they could go do with themselves. So that was that. It was one of the reasons why it was such a šhìŧŧÿ job.
I’m a manager !? I missed that memo. Wait a minute…I’m the guy in charge ! *Picks up phone* Personnel department, fire the person in charge of memo’s, we’re switching to E-Mail and that’s an order !
I greatly appreciate your work. I have heard similar arguments made about teachers. Sometimes we are seen as great and other times I read articles about people who think teachers phone in lessons or don’t work enough etc. Engaging readers and students minds has ups and downs. After a tough day at work, its nice to have a good book to read, so, thank you for working!
There are lots of professions that don’t get the respect they ought to. I’m currently going to grad school part time to study library and information science. However, whenever I tell people I’m going to grad school to learn how to be a librarian, the general reaction is “You need a masters degree for that?” The general view of librarians is generally something involving shelving books and shushing people. If I told people just half the stuff I need to know about for my cataloging class, their head would spin. Not to mention things like management, reference, collection development, the various technology classes, plus research methods and the statistics competency. And all to provide services that the average person will only ever probably use a fraction of. But, it is something that’s got to be done.
Also, professional storytellers. Most people don’t even know that’s a thing or assume it’s reading books aloud to children (real storytellers don’t read aloud, they memorize the story). I know some of those people and the amount of time and effort they spend on their craft can be pretty impressive.
I actually have a great deal of sympathy for the person working at the movie theater in that story. I work retail, and I can’t count the number of times people have insisted on some sale/promotion — from 10% off to “buy one, get one free!” — based on something they heard on the radio or some ad they saw somewhere (but never have with them). At least in your case it was based on a correct ad (I’ve had oh-so-many folks looking for cds at my store that were exclusives for other stores — and ALWAYS said they were exclusives to those other stores IN EVERY AD), but not every employee is informed of every promotion.
A good rule of thumb: Always bring the ad with you, to prove you’re entitled to it.
I’m with James on this, i don’t blame you for being frustrated and yeah she could have been more helpful.
but I can’t tell you how many times I had a customer come in insisting on a sale price that was outdated or for a different company.
I used to work at a radio shack, which in Canada was bought out by Circuit City. So the name changed and for months people would see n ad for Radio shack on a US channel or online and come in asking for that price.
I have sympathy for her not knowing, initially – but no sympathy whatsoever for her disinterest in finding out the actual answer.
try telling people you’re a lawyer
When I was in high school I worked part time as a DJ for the local radio station. I was always amazed at how many of my friends said, “That job is easy, all you do is talk.” That had no idea how much goes on behind the scenes, especially for the guys who put in the effort to do the job well.
Everybody has done math in school, so people know that being an accountant is hard and they couldn’t do it. People know that biology is complicated, so they accept that not everyone can be a doctor. However, if you name a job that someone is mostly unfamiliar with, I give 90% that they assume it is easy. If they’ve never waited tables, then that’s just carrying plates. If they’ve never seriously talked with a truck driver, then they’ll say, “How hard can it be, I can drive.”
So basically, the guy behind PAD had the same problem as the cashier in front of him. If he’d never heard about the hard parts of the job, then they must not exist.
I think people assume that being a writer is easy because anyone can write (though not necessarily well). Not everyone can draw a face, or tie a tourniquet, or program a computer, but everyone can write/type a few sentences, which makes them think that all writing is easy. Of course, those people don’t realize the challenges that go into all forms of writing, whether it’s a screenplay (that has to ultimately look good on a screen), a short story (that has to achieve it’s effect in a relatively short space), a novel (that has to hold the reader’s interest for a relatively long while), etc.
It doesn’t help that the Internet often makes feel that whatever they post is of equal quality to everything else, no matter how many typos or little sense their postings have.
Star Jones is an ultra-conservative commentator?!? Who went to rallies with John Kerry? Who was such a supporter of Clinton she said she’d vote for him a third time? Whose Twitter page introduction says she’s a Democrat?
Wow, that’s just…what’s the justification of that?