Free Harlan Ellison's Watching by Harlan Ellison, Leonard Maltin

of The Train , the Frankenheimer film that'll be opening in about three weeks. Would that do?"
     
    He said yes, I said I'd have it messengered over to him, he said great, said he'd read it, said if it seemed up to their standards and needs he'd run it over to Jack and have him read it, said if Jack went for it he'd push for a Daisy card for me. I said thanks, hung up, and turned to my typewriter.
     
    I wrote that review-critique in about forty minutes. You will find it in this book.
     
    At eight o'clock that night, having sent the review to Curtis Lee by messenger from Four Star around one-thirty that afternoon, I got a phone call at my tiny treehouse home. It was Curtis Lee. "You want me to bring your membership card around, or do you want to pick it up?"
     
    I drove out, met Hanson for the first time in Beverly Hills, and took possession of Daisy membership card number 49. I also accepted an assignment to do a short piece on Edward G. Robinson as he neared his seventy-second birthday.
     
    Both pieces, and two more, appeared in the July-August 1965 issue of Cinema . I was a film critic.
     
    The next day, sitting in Aaron's office with Richard and casting director Betty Martin and three or four others, Aaron came rushing in, tossed the stack of scripts he'd read the night before on his desk and, without preamble, turned to me.
     
    "Well?"
     
    I looked innocent. I can do that. "Well what?"
     
    "You owe me a thousand dollars," he said, Great Whitelike.
     
    Everyone in the room looked nervous. It had been a good gag the day before, but they knew I couldn't possibly have pulled it off, and they now knew that Aaron would certainly call the business people and tell them that Ellison's next assignment was for a thousand less. Richard Newton didn't look happy with me.
     
    "Well, uh, no," I said slowly, forking two ringers into my shirt pocket. "You owe me a thousand." I brought out The Daisy membership card. High Noon. The Guns of Navarone .
     
    Go ahead, picture the scene in your mind. This is a book about movies, so run it through your head. It's good exercise.
     
     
     
    I've written elsewhere, and at length, about my brief crazy time of having Gone Hollywood. Much of that lunacy centered around The Daisy.
     
     
     
*In the September 1966 issue of Los Angeles magazine, appeared a 5200 word article titled "Nightmare Nights at The Daisy." I wrote that article. Apart from a minor reprinting in a men's magazine exactly one year later, that piece has never been collected in one of my books of essays. It forms an interesting Hollywood footnote to this introduction. If you turn to Appendix B (page 423) you will find it as it was written at that moment in my life when I came to my senses and foreswore involvement with the social scene in the movie colony. Upon rereading, I find it verbose, purple, overstated and wincingly melodramatic. But in its way, I guess, it is historical document at its silliest. Like the view of a former Flat-Earther after having taken his first space-ride.
     
     
     
    But if it had not been for the cattle call, for Richard Newton, for my awakening awareness that I did not want to grow up to be Aaron Spelling and needed to one-up the Great Man; had it not been for having been twisted and bent by Hoppity and the need to assert the know-it-all in me who now writes pontificating film criticism; had it not been for Curtis Lee Hanson, my friend and one-time editor, and Cinema magazine, now long-gone but fondly remembered; had it not been for that odd congeries of circumstances, this book of more than twenty-five years' worth of film comment would not exist.
     
    Having thus explained how I was corrupted, warped, driven to this unseemly stretch of writing, I know that those among you who paused in hammering together the gibbet to listen to this interminable screed, will now understand that I am innocent, that never has a cruel thought passed through my head, and that if justice is to be visited on anyone,