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Ghost
on the Coast The coast made me a ghost.
When I made the great leap from 10003 to 90027, TV producers were
unimpressed by the many thousands of productions of my 50 published plays
worldwide. They wanted writers whom someone in TV had already hired, so
that they couldn't be accused of independent judgment in case of a flop. I got a foot in the door
when I met a writer with too many feet in too many doors. He handed me a job he
couldn't handle. It was a show whose producers wanted the same story each
week (eeek-eeek, chase-chase, bang-bang, ha-ha), so I easily delivered a
finished script the next day. He warned me that in the future I should
take longer, because TV producers need to think that their work is
excruciatingly difficult, to justify their fantastic salaries. I sensed
that it was actually he who felt belittled by my facility. I now sit
with finished scripts on my lap and e-mail my writer-employers, “This is much
harder than I could ever believe possible. Can’t you please give me another
week?” This gets me bonuses, and the comment, “TV’s not as much of a
snap as you New York playwrights think it is, huh?” To my surprise, the writer
paid me on delivery. Playwrights get paid only after shows open and
tickets are sold-- sometimes decades after we type “CURTAIN.” But I quickly
adjusted to this TV thing of getting paid right after writing "FADE
OUT," or often even before writing "FADE IN." There was, duh, a catch.
My name wasn’t on the script, nor on the screen. I couldn’t
claim the show. It felt odd to be among people at a bar when it aired, and
to be unable to say, “Why, thank you. I tried.” Nor did the job
lead to other jobs. My writer didn’t want his producer to know that the work
wasn’t his, so he didn’t exactly drag me into the studio as a “find.”
In nine years, I’ve never met a producer. But I’ve met other
writers who bit off more than they could type, and so things proceed pleasantly. I’m hardly L.A.’s only
ghost. I was once hired by a ghost hired by yet another ghost to
"freshen up" a TV movie which already had six pseudonyms on it, plus
several X'ed-out titles. I can’t say if it ever got made, because I have
no idea what they finally named it. Actually, I can’t name
anything I’ve done. That’s the code of a ghost. But I don’t
think I’m revealing too much by saying that they tend to be about awful people
doing awful things to each other. One exception was a hero who did awful
things to himself, but only because he thought at the moment that he was
someone else. Characters in the stories I’m handed frequently have amnesia
and/or aliases, posing as other people or even as each other. They often
shout, “Get down!” meaning not “Boogie!” but, “Something’s about to
explode!” and inevitably, at some point in the proceedings they grin wryly,
wink, and say, “That’s what we WANT them to think.” I haven’t been
too specific, have I? I mean, there must be at least two shows like
that. I don’t invent these
plots. They’re provided by producers, who have often pre-sold their
shows to distributors worldwide by promising them precisely such stories.
Plots churned out by a harried producer until they total twenty-two don't always
make conspicuous sense. Some seem to have been written on a
paper-shredder. I'd love to alter the stories, but that's seldom possible.
I can’t talk to the decision-makers, so I must believe the nervous,
overloaded writers who hire me when they tell me:
“I know scene five is cole-slaw, but you can’t rewrite it. The
producer says that’s how pterodactyls controlled telepathically by Martian
robots really behave.” Occasionally, I can make
minor changes. TV producers want scripts of a certain length-- not a line
more or less. At the bottom of a page on which an axe-murderer was to
commit his tenth or twelfth slaughter, there wasn’t room to detail another
dismemberment. I couldn’t go back and make room; my client was panting
beside a fax machine in Burbank, waiting for filmable pages. So in the one
line left I invented, “On seeing the axe raised, Clara drops dead from
fright.” You might ask why I endure
such loony limitations. The answer is financial. While I don’t
clear as much as the credited writers do, the take startles a mere
playwright. Recently a writer phoned me late in the night to ask for one insult
line. I came up with, "Shut up, or I'll work you over with a
cheese-grater," and got $500 for fifteen seconds of work. That would
work out to $120,000 an hour. But usually, you can calculate my income by
cutting the hired writer’s fee in half and dropping a zero. Sometimes two.
I can’t complain. There’s no ghost’s union. We often get
cash, and we never get credit. Well, almost never. One
weekend a client invited me to his home to view the broadcast of a show I'd
ghosted for him. He promised me a surprise. And he delivered it. I
was credited onscreen. I blushed, “You didn’t have to do that.”
He gushed, “Oh, yes, I did.” I soon saw why. The producers
had kept my first page, my middle page, and my last. What they had forced him to
scribble to fill-in between my bits resembled neither my plot, nor human, nor
hardly even healthy animal behavior. When the nonsense ended and some new
nonsense began, I turned to my friend and said, “You just didn’t want your
name on it.” He grinned wryly, winked, and said, “Welcome to TV.” Robert Patrick’s published work includes the
plays "Kennedy’s Children" and "Untold Decades," and the
novel Temple Slave. He is not the star of “The X-Files,” although he
often gets that Robert Patrick’s fan mail, because he is listed and the actor
isn’t. There’s a lesson in there somewhere. His work can be ordered at rbrtptrck@aol.com.
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