Free Stirling Silliphant: The Fingers of God by Nat Segaloff Page A

library shelves will be more crammed with more film cassettes than with books. There will still be room for theatrical super-screen films and broadcasted (sic) television, but the over-all utility of visual media will have need multiplied for the benefit of both artist and audience.” [254]
    Pingree’s first announced project, however, was the stock television series, Maya, for which Silliphant served as Executive Story Consultant, based on the 1966 MGM film about a boy and his elephant. The Casteneda project was assigned to a Pingree subsidiary called Yaqui Film Company. Mark Silliphant, his nephew, who had attended UCLA’s filmmaking program, was deeply involved in this gambit, which veered into another direction that Castaneda scholars continue to debate. On January 23, 1977, Mark Wood Silliphant, then thirty, married Patricia Lee Partin, a nineteen-year-old waitress. Partin was also known as “The Blue Scout,” a woman both embraced and reviled as the spiritual gatekeeper to Castaneda’s inner circle. Although Mark had already passed the entry test, he and Partin separated after nineteen days and filed for divorce two weeks later — it became final in 1978. Some sources say that she then took up with Castaneda himself, to whom Mark had introduced her the year before. Meanwhile, Mark changed his name to Richard Rollo Whittaker (he had briefly used Mark Austin before that). [255] Needless to say, the film was never made.
    There have been whispers over the years that Pingree, beyond its business purpose, was also a boiler room where young writers anonymously turned out first drafts of Silliphant’s lesser assignments that he would then edit and polish before turning them in under his own name. Nothing else, skeptics insist, could account for his immense output from year to year. In the 1930s and ‘40s, the equally prolific Ben Hecht was rumored to maintain such a cottage industry, and some big-name film composers today are indeed known for employing elves to take up their slack. No evidence of this has been uncovered at Pingree of such a scheme.
    While that was going on, Silliphant practiced his craft, did research as needed, toured the lecture circuit, and built his bankability through publicity and hob-nobbing, rare for a writer, but essential for what today would be called “branding.” A Silliphant script came in on time, was read by top people, was eminently shootable, and was distinguished by character relationships, not glibness, that attracted major talent.
    “I am always, always conscious of language and attitude in order to avoid using words which either had lost their significance or not yet gained it,” he insisted. “For example, in now writing Flying Aces, [256] having to write dialogue for people in 1914, I found myself stuck in my tracks yesterday by the use of the word guy. Did anybody say guy in 1914 in reference to another bloke? A check of Patrice’s Dictionary of Slang Usage informed me that the word in that sense came into use in 1896, so I was okay for 1914 — but you can see I just don’t toss off a phrase such as, ‘Cool, man’ or ‘no way!’ in a non-contemporary window of time. But I do make an effort to use the common language of the film’s period. Another example: I would hardly consider referring to somebody being a ‘spin doctor’ in 1914. But in 1992 [the date of this interview] it’s already a cliché.
    “As to TV permitting better social criticism than features because it’s more timely, in theory that perception makes sense. In practice, it doesn’t. Because the networks, the programmers and 99 percent of Hollywood TV writers deal with social issues in the most superficial, viewer-slanted sense. Life, as you well know, is hardly ever solved in fifty minutes. TV, unlike theatrical films, leaps to its hardcore points, losing mood and texture and depth in its skip-dancing.” [This has changed since these interviews. — NS]
    One of the most disappointing