Posts
Joseph Stefano (1922-2006)
It’s been one of the great pleasures of my life to meet many of my writer heroes, people such as Terrance Dicks and Murray Smith, and in some cases work with them. It’s with great regret that I note that, on August 25th., one of my absolute favourites passed away. Joseph Stefano was eighty four, and died of a heart attack in Thousand Oaks, California. It was a weird sort of shock to realise that, had I known where he lived, in the last week of his life I was in a position to visit him. The various obituaries mostly focus on his script for Psycho, but good as that is, I think his masterpieces lie elsewhere.
Stefano’s work was one of the reasons I became a writer. As a kid, I would notice who wrote what TV shows, and start to anticipate a good episode when particular names appeared in the opening credits: Robert Holmes; D.C. Fontana; Steven Moffat. I would stay up late to watch The Outer Limits on BBC2, which was on very late on a Friday night, after The Old Grey Whistle Test and Newsnight. This is pre-video recorders. My parents would never have let me stay up so late on a school night. I’d chow on a Pot Noodle, and often fall asleep during the other shows. So the weird East European puppet films Whistle Test used to show for visuals during prog rock tracks, and Newsnight’s strident theme became part of the whole mysterious process of visiting that oasis of black and white anthology weirdness. Reaching puberty was also an important part of it (and I’ve recently revisited this in the writing of the new novel, which draws a lot on my childhood), in that without knowing what I was doing I, well, reached puberty during the episode ‘The Human Factor’, starring Robert Culp, an ice ghost, and, most importantly, Sally Kellerman. It was with some anticipation that I watched that episode again on DVD. And some disappointment. Which is probably a good thing. Lab equipment and experimental monkeys would be an expensive fetish.
BBC2 showed their Outer Limits episodes in a completely random order, so you didn’t know if you were going to get something from the wonderful first season or the lacklusture (and without Stefano) second season. First season: gorgeous lighting and direction; freaky monsters; mind bending scripts. Second season: no money; no art; a lot of talking heads and, okay, two really great Harlan Ellison scripts. Amongst the first season entries, I learned to look for the name Joseph Stefano on the writing as well as production credits. Here’s a list of his full scripts for that show in that year:
‘A Feasibility Study’.
‘Nightmare’.
‘The Zanti Misfits’.
‘It Crawled Out of the Woodwork’.
‘The Mice’.
‘The Invisibles’.
‘Don’t Open Till Doomsday’.
‘The Bellero Shield’.
‘Fun and Games’.
‘The Forms of Things Unknown’.
Plus credited contributions to eight other scripts. He was what these days we would call a showrunner. In late 1963 he reached some kind of creative peak. ‘I didn’t have the time to do treatments or outlines. I just made them up as I went along, according to a vision in my head – not a step by step formula, but more like a dream.’
And that’s the heart of it, I think. The expressionist direction of people like Gerd Oswald and Conrad Hall, all patches of shadow and slanted light, helps us get there, but it’s the writing that induces a genuine sense of dream logic. ‘The Zanti Misfits’ starts with the military cordoning off a section of desert, ready for the arranged arrival of a group of criminals from the planet Zanti. Nobody knows what they’ll look like. A fleeing couple stumble into this forbidden zone. The couple have done wrong and suspect they’re going to suffer for it. They discover foot long stop motion ants with human faces. The fact that Wah Chang’s models look a little hokey today somehow helps in making them genuinely disturbing.
‘Nightmare’ starts with human soldiers held as prisoners of war in a white-walled studio by monstrous aliens. It feels like a dream, but the endings of these pieces are never ‘it was all a dream’. Rather, we know that from the start. One of the prisoners has his sight taken away and given back, on the condition that he look at the corpse of his fellow prisoner, from whom the aliens have taken the heart, and put it in a box.
Stefano’s dialogue is dreamlike too, determinedly anti-realist, while getting us right to the heart of his characters. This was the era of great dialogue in American TV, where characters were expected to talk in the hard-nosed, highly romantic lyricism of plays like ‘Requiem for a Heavyweight’, a style just to the left of the Kitchen Sink. It was blank verse that nobody in the real world would have come out with, but felt right because of that. It felt as if truths were being told, apt for the ordinary people who were saying them, unlimited by the speech patterns of such characters in the world. This, like so many other things to do with Stefano, isn’t something you see too much these days.
Many commentators think the height of Stefano’s approach is ‘Don’t Open Till Doomsday’, with its ‘Hotel California’ of trapped residents in a hotel orbiting frustratedly around a phallic monster contained in a box. But I’d opt for ‘The Invisibles’, where we’re with a secret agent as he infiltrates a conspiracy at the heart of government, run by men who keep ‘a sick, nameless nucleus’, that is a monstrous insect, lodged in their spines, directing their thoughts. He crawls along with a broken ankle as one such attempts to mount him, emitting hungry roars as it approaches. Network censor Dorothy Brown told Stefano ‘This film bothers me, and I can’t tell you why, or what to cut.’
Stefano’s final script for the show was ‘The Form of Things Unknown’, intended as a pilot for a spinoff fantasy series. It resembles nothing so much as European art cinema, David McCallum in a room full of clocks and taut piano wire, Vera Miles being forced to march into a lake in her little dinner dress to serve her master cocktails.
Stefano left the show in a row over the way the networks had been treating it, moving it to tough timeslots, never understanding or taking care of it. But various contributors have suggested that had he stayed he would have run himself into the ground. He was exhausted, and he’d bared his unconscious, full of Freudian insights and stark raving terror, to the world. He’d brought art to primetime. The irony of it all is that, while many of his episodes are well remembered, they’re often jammed deep into the unconsciousness of the viewer… and they tend to recall them as episodes of The Twilight Zone.
I’m sad that Joseph Stefano is no longer in the world, and recommend his work as the height of the art of telefantasy.
Quotes and info for this piece taken from David J. Schow’s excellent The Outer Limits Companion.
Announcements:
ITEM! I’m still working on an American Wisdom distribution offer. Watch this space. On October 4th, Marvel will be publishing a low-priced sampler for its whole MAX line of adult comics, including Wisdom:
http://www.marvel.com/news/comicstories.629
And Wisdom’s Web is a very cool Pete Wisdom fansite, including a lot of the history of the character:
http://www.wisdomsweb.co.uk/
ITEM! On his blog, the comic artist D’Israeli, or Matt Brooker to his friends, is presenting the cover art for the soon to be published collection of my and his strip XTNCT. And very lovely it is too.
http://disraeli-demon.blogspot.com/
ITEM! Robin Hood begins on BBC1 on Saturday October 7th. Which means my first episode should be on on October 21st. From the look of the preview, it’s going to be a cracking show. The press, on whose bus I rode between the preview venue and the party, were certainly buzzing with good opinion. And seats in the preview cinema were hard to find. It’s always a good sign when the press smuggle in their mates.
ITEM! Having been to a couple of Doctor Who readthroughs since last we spoke, I can say we’re in for an excellent third season. Gareth Roberts’ Shakespeare episode especially impresses. And Russell is firing on all cylinders. I’m about to deliver another set of drafts of my two parter, and I’m enjoying myself immensely.
ITEM! Our line-up for the charity Doctor Who writers’ dinner, now set for Friday October 27th, in aid of Mark Millar’s Crohn’s Disease cure fund project, is now as follows: me and Moffat; Toby Whithouse; Gareth Roberts; Rob Shearman; Stephen Greenhorn, new script editor Gary Russell and, not part of the new series, but very much our guru, Terrance Dicks. And, of course, the two highest bidders. With more to come. Photos and hungover memories will be posted after.
I'm up to my eyes in work at the moment, with Who, Wisdom, my own BBC1 pitch and something exciting in the field of prose which I can't talk about yet all demanding my attention at once. But I'm always pleased to wander out here and talk to the audience. Until next time, cheerio.
Stefano’s work was one of the reasons I became a writer. As a kid, I would notice who wrote what TV shows, and start to anticipate a good episode when particular names appeared in the opening credits: Robert Holmes; D.C. Fontana; Steven Moffat. I would stay up late to watch The Outer Limits on BBC2, which was on very late on a Friday night, after The Old Grey Whistle Test and Newsnight. This is pre-video recorders. My parents would never have let me stay up so late on a school night. I’d chow on a Pot Noodle, and often fall asleep during the other shows. So the weird East European puppet films Whistle Test used to show for visuals during prog rock tracks, and Newsnight’s strident theme became part of the whole mysterious process of visiting that oasis of black and white anthology weirdness. Reaching puberty was also an important part of it (and I’ve recently revisited this in the writing of the new novel, which draws a lot on my childhood), in that without knowing what I was doing I, well, reached puberty during the episode ‘The Human Factor’, starring Robert Culp, an ice ghost, and, most importantly, Sally Kellerman. It was with some anticipation that I watched that episode again on DVD. And some disappointment. Which is probably a good thing. Lab equipment and experimental monkeys would be an expensive fetish.
BBC2 showed their Outer Limits episodes in a completely random order, so you didn’t know if you were going to get something from the wonderful first season or the lacklusture (and without Stefano) second season. First season: gorgeous lighting and direction; freaky monsters; mind bending scripts. Second season: no money; no art; a lot of talking heads and, okay, two really great Harlan Ellison scripts. Amongst the first season entries, I learned to look for the name Joseph Stefano on the writing as well as production credits. Here’s a list of his full scripts for that show in that year:
‘A Feasibility Study’.
‘Nightmare’.
‘The Zanti Misfits’.
‘It Crawled Out of the Woodwork’.
‘The Mice’.
‘The Invisibles’.
‘Don’t Open Till Doomsday’.
‘The Bellero Shield’.
‘Fun and Games’.
‘The Forms of Things Unknown’.
Plus credited contributions to eight other scripts. He was what these days we would call a showrunner. In late 1963 he reached some kind of creative peak. ‘I didn’t have the time to do treatments or outlines. I just made them up as I went along, according to a vision in my head – not a step by step formula, but more like a dream.’
And that’s the heart of it, I think. The expressionist direction of people like Gerd Oswald and Conrad Hall, all patches of shadow and slanted light, helps us get there, but it’s the writing that induces a genuine sense of dream logic. ‘The Zanti Misfits’ starts with the military cordoning off a section of desert, ready for the arranged arrival of a group of criminals from the planet Zanti. Nobody knows what they’ll look like. A fleeing couple stumble into this forbidden zone. The couple have done wrong and suspect they’re going to suffer for it. They discover foot long stop motion ants with human faces. The fact that Wah Chang’s models look a little hokey today somehow helps in making them genuinely disturbing.
‘Nightmare’ starts with human soldiers held as prisoners of war in a white-walled studio by monstrous aliens. It feels like a dream, but the endings of these pieces are never ‘it was all a dream’. Rather, we know that from the start. One of the prisoners has his sight taken away and given back, on the condition that he look at the corpse of his fellow prisoner, from whom the aliens have taken the heart, and put it in a box.
Stefano’s dialogue is dreamlike too, determinedly anti-realist, while getting us right to the heart of his characters. This was the era of great dialogue in American TV, where characters were expected to talk in the hard-nosed, highly romantic lyricism of plays like ‘Requiem for a Heavyweight’, a style just to the left of the Kitchen Sink. It was blank verse that nobody in the real world would have come out with, but felt right because of that. It felt as if truths were being told, apt for the ordinary people who were saying them, unlimited by the speech patterns of such characters in the world. This, like so many other things to do with Stefano, isn’t something you see too much these days.
Many commentators think the height of Stefano’s approach is ‘Don’t Open Till Doomsday’, with its ‘Hotel California’ of trapped residents in a hotel orbiting frustratedly around a phallic monster contained in a box. But I’d opt for ‘The Invisibles’, where we’re with a secret agent as he infiltrates a conspiracy at the heart of government, run by men who keep ‘a sick, nameless nucleus’, that is a monstrous insect, lodged in their spines, directing their thoughts. He crawls along with a broken ankle as one such attempts to mount him, emitting hungry roars as it approaches. Network censor Dorothy Brown told Stefano ‘This film bothers me, and I can’t tell you why, or what to cut.’
Stefano’s final script for the show was ‘The Form of Things Unknown’, intended as a pilot for a spinoff fantasy series. It resembles nothing so much as European art cinema, David McCallum in a room full of clocks and taut piano wire, Vera Miles being forced to march into a lake in her little dinner dress to serve her master cocktails.
Stefano left the show in a row over the way the networks had been treating it, moving it to tough timeslots, never understanding or taking care of it. But various contributors have suggested that had he stayed he would have run himself into the ground. He was exhausted, and he’d bared his unconscious, full of Freudian insights and stark raving terror, to the world. He’d brought art to primetime. The irony of it all is that, while many of his episodes are well remembered, they’re often jammed deep into the unconsciousness of the viewer… and they tend to recall them as episodes of The Twilight Zone.
I’m sad that Joseph Stefano is no longer in the world, and recommend his work as the height of the art of telefantasy.
Quotes and info for this piece taken from David J. Schow’s excellent The Outer Limits Companion.
Announcements:
ITEM! I’m still working on an American Wisdom distribution offer. Watch this space. On October 4th, Marvel will be publishing a low-priced sampler for its whole MAX line of adult comics, including Wisdom:
http://www.marvel.com/news/comicstories.629
And Wisdom’s Web is a very cool Pete Wisdom fansite, including a lot of the history of the character:
http://www.wisdomsweb.co.uk/
ITEM! On his blog, the comic artist D’Israeli, or Matt Brooker to his friends, is presenting the cover art for the soon to be published collection of my and his strip XTNCT. And very lovely it is too.
http://disraeli-demon.blogspot.com/
ITEM! Robin Hood begins on BBC1 on Saturday October 7th. Which means my first episode should be on on October 21st. From the look of the preview, it’s going to be a cracking show. The press, on whose bus I rode between the preview venue and the party, were certainly buzzing with good opinion. And seats in the preview cinema were hard to find. It’s always a good sign when the press smuggle in their mates.
ITEM! Having been to a couple of Doctor Who readthroughs since last we spoke, I can say we’re in for an excellent third season. Gareth Roberts’ Shakespeare episode especially impresses. And Russell is firing on all cylinders. I’m about to deliver another set of drafts of my two parter, and I’m enjoying myself immensely.
ITEM! Our line-up for the charity Doctor Who writers’ dinner, now set for Friday October 27th, in aid of Mark Millar’s Crohn’s Disease cure fund project, is now as follows: me and Moffat; Toby Whithouse; Gareth Roberts; Rob Shearman; Stephen Greenhorn, new script editor Gary Russell and, not part of the new series, but very much our guru, Terrance Dicks. And, of course, the two highest bidders. With more to come. Photos and hungover memories will be posted after.
I'm up to my eyes in work at the moment, with Who, Wisdom, my own BBC1 pitch and something exciting in the field of prose which I can't talk about yet all demanding my attention at once. But I'm always pleased to wander out here and talk to the audience. Until next time, cheerio.
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Stories by Moffat? When you were a kid? Don't think I didn't spot that cheeky dig, young man!
Okay, I wasn't so much a kid. And he kind of was.
So...does this mean Gary Russell is now script editor for the TV series? I hadn't seen this before (but I wondered what he was going to be doing upon resigning Big Finish). Think he's being groomed to take over for RTD post-season four?
And can you comment, from your recollection of the Shakespeare episode, if there's any acknowledgement of the Doctor meeting Shakespeare before, or will the OG forums be all a-twitter about continuity?
It's already been announced that Gary's now one of the script editing team. And I don't give out information about what I've heard in readthroughs.
That's pretty cool about Gary. I just hadn't seen it announced (not that I'm Mr. Informed). What a great career arc for him! It's so wonderful that DW is actually being run by (and written by) fans -- the inmates taking over the asylum.
Outer Limits is one of those shows I never got a chance to really see. I mostly remember the opening credits, of course. But it's great that he got to kill Tasha Yar in what I always thought of as a nicely futile way. Of course, I haven't seen the episode since it first aired, but I remember her death being relatively senseless rather than big-time heroic.
Paul, I am really looking forward to Robin Hood and even if I decide the rest is rubbish, I am definitely watching your episode :)
Re the Doctor Who Shakespeare episode, Russell T Davies was asked the same question and he said that it's not acknowledged but it's not contradicted either.
Oh yes! I'd forgotten about Stefano writing that! It's a pity he wasn't around for more of the Trek spinoffs. Steve Gerber did a good show for them also. I'm glad Russell's said something, phew! I hope you like Robin when you see it. Sorry about the high horse there for a moment, Neil. One gets bowled these awkward deliveries as a Who writer, and having to carefully frame replies to them is kind of irritating. I know you're not the sort of guy who does that on a regular basis. My apologies again.
Hurray, your ep shows on my birthday. Fantastic.
Obviously a theme party is called for.
Thanks for the recommendation! Better get the thing up-dated :)
Looking forward to Robin Hood myself.
I hope we have you onboard for the whole run, it'd be good to get some reaction from Wisdom fans. Well, I say that now...
Great thoughts about Stefano, Paul. There's something quite dark about The Outer Limits, even compared to The Twilight Zone, and as you said, in Stefano's work it's often couched in dreamlike terms (aided by some extraordinary direction and acting).
I always think of that brand of TV writing, very much the norm in US TV drama in the 60s, as kind of "operatic" in its intensity and theatricality. It was Star Trek's house style, even all the way through its more recent incarnations (working best in DS9, IMHO). You don't see near as much of this style these days, though Aaron Sorkin (and to a lesser extent, David E. Kelley) regularly gives it a contemporary spin. There's something about grand, richly written soliloquoys that either works quite well or throws the whole thing off the rails; a delicate balance to maintain.
BTW, I've got a mostly-TV blog over on Wordpress (dkompare.wordpress.com); ignore my Blogger blog, as I'd completely forgotten that I'd started it! Good luck with RH, DW, Marvel, the novel, and keeping up with BG!
That's all true about the theatrical style, Derek. I really like it, and would like to see a more heightened reality in TV dialogue. That's an interesting blog too.
I'm relatively non rabid and well past puberty so you should be quite safe.
You know, I had no context for that at all until I came and had a look. Always good to be assured of that out of the blue.
This post sort of... I don't know, inspired me to pick up the DVDs and reassess the show. I hadn't seen some of these since I was a kid.
So thanks.
Result! Cool!