"'Hate Puppet'!? What the Hell is a 'Hate Puppet'?"
Or:
"Hey, C'mon . . . I thought I'd throw you a bone!"

I just finished your column-intelligent, insightful, and hilarious. This is what columns should be about. Keep up the good work!

—Kealan-Patrick Burke

I laughed and laughed and laughed! I love your style-you've got a huge fan over here in Norway, and you can quote me on that!

—Morten Loken Kvaernstrom

I wanted to write and let you know how much I've been enjoying your column in CD-especially the past few.

—Geoff Cooper

Okay, the early feedback on the last column had been extremely good, as usual. I didn't get anything negative, or I would have included a few examples to show you I value every chance to become a better person. Love me or hate me, you may reach me at POB 1529, Grantham NH 03753 or scribe@adelphia.net.

But as I write this while sitting in my office and look out the window, I see the green, lush forest of mid-summer in New Hampshire. That means it's shady and secluded and the first column I did about working in TV hasn't been published yet. In that column, I promised a second, more surreal tale of the incredulous from the land of strip malls and cell phones and failed trendy restaurants.

So here's how it starts:

It's early autumn a couple years back and I'm outside with my power tools and my Uncle Frank-we're extending the lower deck on my house so it wraps around to become the eventual floor of the mud-room I am building to connect the garage to the house. Pressure-treated lumber, measuring tapes, power-drivers, bags of nails and deck-screws, and the occasional wail of nice table saw surround us with a panoply of manly items and sounds. Naturally, Uncle Frank and I are working without anything so superfluous as "plans, " and we are cutting and sawing and drilling on-the-fly, and the deck is taking miraculous shape.

In the middle of this wondrous construction, I get a phone call from a young lady who identifies herself as the story editor of a television series called Night Visions, and she is calling to tell me she just read my story in Al Sarantonnio's apocalyptic anthology, 999, and thought is was "so completely kick-ass" she wanted to buy it for the show.

I tell her that is great news and she should get in touch with my agent at the William Morris Agency and they would do all the paperwork. I ask her some questions about the show, and she sounds totally up and enthusiastic about what they have in the works-(which is the usual Beverly Hills Bullshit when it comes to anthology shows on TV) that's it's going to be a "modern" Twilight Zone with all the style and grace and wit of the original. I nod, smiling to myself, having heard all this before but secretly hoping that maybe this time, the fairy tale can come true. She tells me it has been picked up by Fox, which has been offering up some interesting alternative programming, and I am not feeling completely terrible yet. I then ask her the inevitable question about the script-which is just exactly who will be adapting my original story and writing the script?

That is always a good question, friends. A question that only has one good answer and about 14 bad ones. The good answer is: "Why, there's only one person qualified to write a script based on this story-the actual creator of the piece, you!"

The 14 bad ones are: the 14 finnochios the producers have hired to be the "house writers" on the show. These are the guys who will sit around each week and review the stories and decide en masse how they can "improve" your original material. They will then carve off a section of their bulk to actually write the script through several drafts and bearing the paw-prints of at least three or four of them.

The story editor, I can tell, is now smiling with radiant condescension through the phone. She gives me the usual "house writer" shuffle, and I tell her I would like to be considered for the gig. She logs in my request with all the élan of a coat-check girl, and tells me she'll check it out with Dan Angel, one of the show's two showrunners. She also says she will be getting back to me later about other stories because "your story act, is like so real, man . . ."

Yeah, I always thought so too.

Anyway, I punch out the connection and replace my portable phone with a portable Milwaukee 14v Power Driver and I'm back in contractor-mode. I'm feeling good about the deck I'm building and the story I just sold to the TV People.

About three or four weeks go by and I get a call from my then-agent in television, who tells me she has all the standard agreements from Dan Angel Productions and just sign them in all the right places. I tell her I'm going to be in L.A. within the month, and hey, why doesn't she see if she can set up a meeting with me and the Night Visions people? I have some other stories for the story editor and it doesn't help to shmooze them and connect this pretty face to the great writing and all that bizz.

She agrees, so when I get out to Los Angeles, whereupon I am hanging out with my compaesano, Johnny DeChancie at his place, one of the appointments on my list is to meet with the goodly folks who bought my story for television. But it's a little weird, and this early on, I should have been paying attention to those still-faint quasi-blips on the radar, but I must have been on an extended coffee (and brain) break. I was in L.A. and I was in full-shmooze mode, which meant operating on a kind of self-induced, body-enzymes high in which you believe you can pitch even the dumbest idea to sound like Crime and Punishment and convince even the guy who clip-boards you onto the Sony lot that you are the latest Lawrence-Kasdan-Joe-Esterhaus-of-the-week.

So how weird was it? you ask . . . .

Well, like the story editor, whose name I think was Michelle, tells me when I call to confirm time and address, says we should meet at this restaurant instead of at Angel Productions HQ, which I figure is no problem because I never turn down a free lunch (even though I know there ain't no such thing . . . ). She also says she's bringing along her assistant, whom I recall being named BillySomething.

Long story short, I show up at this quasi-South American-themed place which can't seem to decide what country's cultural bric-a-bracs should accent the stucco and tile and brass-bradded wooden fixtures, and in walks two people in their early twenties, who approach me at the bar and introduce themselves as the forces majeurs behind what they see as the "modern Twilight Zone."

Now at the risk of sounding like a true, Charlie-Grantian, Old Fart, I gotta say I was stunned to see how young the both of them looked. They were dressed in typical Los Angeles working-chic, which is a kind of studied, expensive sloppiness, and their hair was fashionably unbrushed. I once-overed them and the thought struck me they must be incredibly bright to have landed jobs of such responsibility and influence.

Well, I thought to myself . . . we'll see.

So I spend the next hour-plus with these two kids and I am dumbstruck by how fucking dumb they are. They aren't mental midgets in the truest sense because they claim to possess college degrees and do employ vocabularies that would qualify them to make good insurance salesmen; but they are still dummies. And here's why . . .

As I talk to them, I discover that they have no historical or cultural sense of the kinds of material they are supposedly compiling for their anthology show. Like most people in their early twenties, they have not read much of anybody and think the early Friday the 13th films are ancient cinematic history right alongside Fairbanks' Thief of Baghdad and Lang's M. I sit there stunned as I discover they are in charge of the narrative corpus of a project which is supposed to be a showcase for dark fantasy and suspense . . . and they have no knowledge of writers such as Cornell Woolrich, Ambrose Bierce, Richard Matheson, Charles Beaumont, Gerald Kersh, Ted Sturgeon, John Wyndham, Dash Hammet, Raymond Chandler, Robert Sheckley, Jim Thompson, Ed Gorman, or even Harlan Ellison or Joe Lansdale.

BillySomething "thinks" he's seen some Hitchcock, and a couple of Outer Limits, but tells me he's not really into "that kind of stuff." Michelle is more open to the classic stuff but thinks that new "talents" like Tarentino and Rodriguez are just simply "blowing away" all the old "misconceptions" about what is really "edgy."

"Edgy" is in fact one of her favorite words, and she wheels it on-stage for a performance in just about every sentence. It gets old in a hurry, and I am so bored of our conversation, I am getting real fucking edgy to get out of there. But I am curious to discover how and why she decided to buy the rights to my story, so I pursue that avenue of happenstance.
Michele tells me rather off-handedly they didn't have much of a plan or an idea where they were going to get "story ideas" for Night Visions, so they came up with a great stratagem-they asked their friends!!!

Yeah.

They took suggestions from their friends about any good books or comics or stories they might have read lately. Michele had a friend who'd just finished 999, and told her my story had been the best one in the book, and she should buy it for her show. Michele read it and agreed. I guess you might think I should be liking Michele and be very happy she bought my story, but the kicker was Michele never bothered to read the rest of the stories in 999. Actually, she said she "started" to read them, but nothing was really happening with them. BillySomething tells me that the more he tried to find material, the harder it seemed to be, and the thinking around the "house writers table" at Night Visions Central was that they could all probably come up with their own stuff just as easily.

Well, that certainly made me feel good-a couple of semi-literate (in the real sense of the phrase) mooks who think they are capable of developing tightly-plotted, original tales of dark suspense with as much facility and skill as any writers who've been publishing such material all of their adult lives.

Yeah.

I had a folder with other sample stories and a list of synopses of others which I had planned to give them, but I never bothered. I kind of felt like Immanuel Kant reciting passages from his Critique of Pure Reason to a convention of Circus roustabouts. In addition, both of them had admitted that they probably weren't going to stay with the show because working TV wasn't as "exciting" as they'd imagined it. Michele was thinking about going back to her homestate (somewhere in the Midwest), and BillySomething was thinking seriously about bartending.

What a pair. . .

I still cannot fathom how either of them had gotten their jobs unless the positions of "story acquisitions producers" had been considered to be so lightweight, that the showrunners just opened the service doors to their building a pulled in the first people who passed by. So we get up to leave and these two "story editors" start divvying up the check, and I looked at them kind of quizzically. They had no idea they were expected to pay for my portion of the bill because I was their guest, and by that point, I figured there was little point in giving these guys a clinic on their lack of professional acumen on so many levels.

So I walk out into the glaring sun of Beverly Hills, climb into my rental car, and begin to wonder what exactly will be the "night vision" of my story.

What vision indeed . . .

So about 8 or 9 months go by, and suddenly it's early summer of 2001, and I see a few trailers and screen-splashes for NIGHT VISIONS coming soon! to Fox. I make a mental note to check out the show because of my obvious vested interest in it, and I do indeed catch the premiere episode. In a subtly surreal stroke of cosmic humor, I am a little surprised to one of the segments featuring the stoical and oddly non-enigmatic stage stylings of the selfsame Lou Diamond Phillips, lately of Wolf Lake infamy.

I should have realized what a harbinger of true dread that darkly odd coincidence suggested.

But, I digress. On with the show.

Night Visions opens with some acceptable CGI graphics and the litany of credits, and then we get the new millennium's version of Rod Serling-this guy standing there in front of a blank screen who looks vaguely familiar to me. He is wearing a tight black T-shirt, which emphasizes an ugly tat on one arm, and the lighting plays havoc with some early weatherbeating on his face. He speaks with either a slight speech impediment or a highly-affected pronunciation style. Whatever the case, he is annoying and about as dramatic as the average guy you might bump into at your neighborhood auto parts store . The only thing good about him is the brevity of his opening story-into-it is mercifully truncated and therefore does not sound as inane as it is. The "host" mumbles something trite about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, and off we go into the world of dark suspense for a new century...

I sat for the next hour alternating between states up abject stupefaction and just slightly controlled rampage. Please, allow me to share with you what the showrunners and (presumably) the literature-free story people of the Michele and BillySomething ilk have decided in their boundless wisdom to present on the Night Visions premiere.

(Bearing in mind the notion that you are going to lead-in with some of your best stuff, the stories and performances that will strike deep into the psyches of the audience like daisy-cutters at Tora Bora, and hook the viewers with an insatiable need to see whatever kick-ass stuff is still working its way through the pipe in upcoming weeks.)

Yeah, that would seem to be the plan if you're launching a new show and you're looking for your audience.

So (if you didn't punish yourself with a personal viewing when it premiered), you're probably wondering just exactly what aired that night.
Let me tell you.

The first half hour gave us the riveting tale of Lou Diamond Phillips as a radio show host being plagued and haunted by calls from one of his listeners. And here's the big twist, the caller wants to kill him. Wow, you know, I never saw that one before, how 'bout you? Talk about suspense with a capital "SUS" . . . well, I gotta tell you, I was just flummoxed. And all this with Lou Diamond eyebrows a-raising at every funny noise in the late-night radio studio.

But it was the second episode that really galvanized me and turned me into a real fan of Night Visions. We open on a young couple with a real estate agent closing a deal on a picture perfect little "starter home,"- you've seen it, the little bungalow with the porch and the short walk and tight little postage stamp of grass out front. Anyway, the couple is deliriously happy with their new home and as the real estate agent is walking out the door, she pauses thoughtfully, turns back to the couple and says: "Oh, you know what . . . did I forget to tell you that there was a little trouble here with the last owners of this place?"

(Yeah, no shit—she actually says that, or a close approximation of same.)

So after an appropriate upswelling of EERIE MUSAK, and my recovery from paroxysms of fear and trembling, the young couple just smile and shrug and say hey-that's-okay. And then we stumble our way through the next half-hour of recycled, hackneyed tripe watching the young hubby starts ACTING WEIRD and his diz-bang honey of a wife doesn't notice ANYTHING WRONG. Until finally the transformed husband is knuckle-scraping and slavering and knife-wielding his way around the house in the best tradition of the hundred or so previous renditions of this turkey-plot (of which I can only stand to mention The Amityville Horror and the execrable Kubrick version of The Shining . . . but you can fill in any number of awful films here).

The episode wraps up in a neat blanket of utter predictability and I am awestruck by the consummate banality of the show. But, ever the glass-is-half-full optimist, I delude myself into hoping that maybe Dan Angel and the rest of them are going to need a little time to get their legs, as they say.

So I watch Night Visions each week and after about ten more shows, I've seen enough to put this project on my all-time Worst Squawking Bird list. The stiff Henry Rollins lead-ins and lead-outs have retained their essential absence of anything that might be confused with style or wit. Only episode out of the twenty or so with which I've flagellated myself has even a scintilla of substance-and it is no accident its credit list it as based on a story by Bob Leman (a wonderful short story writer from Pittsburgh).

Which reminds me-other than the Leman story, I can honestly say I don't recall seeing any other episodes which based upon previously published stories. Almost everything has been written by a small cadre of house-writers and producers who have demonstrated an uncanny ability to not know the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.

The show was so egregiously bad I don't where to begin its deconstruction. I sent a long e-mail to the showrunner, Dan Angel, in which I told him in clear, precise language how awful the show was, and why it would be going away like a noisome odor in slow dissipation. The target-audience was obviously people in their twenties who had a sense for MTV and little else. The characters, in most cases, were also people in their twenties who had the deductive reasoning and moral fiber of paramecia. If they shared one major trait, it was their singular ability to make stupid decisions with untrammeled arrogance. Your basic plot- engine-shitheel gets come-uppance-over and over again. And lots of phony suspense with the old hand-on-the-shoulder-gasp! shtick that turns out to be one of the friends who turns the wrong corner unexpectedly. Cliché after cliché parades itself before the cameras as one episode after another does a sorry dance routine with the maniac-who's-coming-to-chop-you-up. It was all so tired and full of people doing the usual dumb things to make the geriatric plots fumble to their obvious resolutions.

It was all so totally dreary and embarrassing, I told Dan Angel I had no idea why they paid me a goodly sum for the rights to my story-because they would fuck it up with a thoroughness not seen since the French cavalry charged the Kaiser's machine guns with sabers flashing. He told me it didn't seem likely they would "get to" my story by the end of the summer season, and if the series didn't get "picked up," it would never be produced.

Believe it or not, I sincerely hoped that would be true. The last thing I wanted was to see a story of depth and complexity such as "Rehearsals" reduced to the level of Herschel Gordon Lewis doing music videos.

But actually, if you can imagine it, something worse happened . . .

It is the end of the summer and the final segment of Night Visions is getting ready to air, and I am in the kitchen making coffee. The little TV on the counter (which Elizabeth usually has running while she performs her gourmet magicks) is on and I absently scan the opening credits. Over the weeks, I have kept watching the wretched show with the kind of off-the-chart morbidity of people who collect autopsy photos. I can't help myself. It's like watching a train wreck in slo-mo, and not being able to avert thine gaze.

Anyway, this is the last one, and I figure I'll participate in its Viking funeral by firing one last flaming arrow into the show's drifting barque.

So, after Henry Rollins' acutely clumsy intro, the action fades as the episode's title fills the screen:

HATE PUPPET

it says, and I immediately think: wow, that's a dumb title. But I'm cool with it because I have become inured to the quintessential dumbness that is Night Visions. I am cool with it until the next credit appears:

based on a story by
Thomas F. Monteleone

it says, and seems to linger on the screen for about seven minutes.
I am bludgeoned by the shock-recognition of what I have just seen. My name affixed to a story title I never wrote and never sold to them. I am confused. The only thing I can figure is that the producers have decided to do "Rehearsals" and change the name to "Hate Puppet"-although the logic of such decision remains elusive at best.

As I watch the episode unravel, several things become very obvious very quickly:

1.) this is not an adaptation of my short story.

2.) this is one of the WORST episodes in Night Visions' already putrescent corpus.

3.) My name has become forever linked with this illogical and gratuitously violent piece of shit.

I watch as the protagonist is subjected to a series of non-sequiturs and loosely connected events which have no relationship to the concept of cause-and-effect or this truly alien concept call story-logic. Things are happening in the story for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON other than this single one-the scriptwriters and the director wanted them to.

Logic? Who needs it?

The final scene is supposed to be one of those classic endings-within-an-ending which only serves to compound the nonsensical events which have unseamed themselves in the previous 22 minutes. The hows and whys of what has transpired are completely ignored and even the casual and brain-damaged viewers will be left with a single thought: what the hell was that all about?

I called a couple of my buddies, both locally and around the country, to tell them what I'd just witnessed, and they all commiserated with the right amounts of humor and shock. Then I punched in Dan Angel's Los Angeles number and demanded to know what was going on. I was understandably outraged and was having a very tough time controlling my voice and my anger.

The showrunner was very surprised. He'd honestly thought I would be happy to see my screen credit, and I asked him why I would possibly be happy to see my name associated with such an obvious turd as "Hate Puppet"? And by the way, what the fuck was a 'hate puppet'?

He went on to explain that he'd honestly appreciated all the weeks of e-mails and phone calls I'd sent him during the course of the show; he believed I really cared about what he was doing. And he really felt bad that he never got a chance to adapt my short story, so he figured he would "throw me a bone."

"From here, it feels more like you gave me the bone," I said.

He chuckled into his Motorola Star-Tac, and said he was sorry I felt that way, and wished me well. He would go back to producing his insipid video monuments, and I would return to my arcane world of words on paper.

So anyway, I hear that the good old Sky-Fie Channel has picked up the brief run of Night Visions episodes. If you get a chance, catch a few hackneyed weeks, and tell me if I caught the . . . ah . . . flavor of the show. And if you're really lucky, you might be watching the night they re-run their homage to my abilities as a storyteller.
And as my pals Matt Costello and Rick Hautala have said: we all can't wait for the sequel—Hate Puppet II: No Strings.

Hey, I'm outta here.

Shameless Hype and Promotion: Fearful Symmetries should be available now. I expect ALL of you to buy it and send me a full critical report. Hey, it took twenty years to write, okay? And also keep an eye peeled (as long as it doesn't hurt too much) for my latest novel from Tor/Forge, The Eyes of the Virgin.