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

experiences Silliphant faced was the 1981 TV movie that was to serve as a pilot for a series about Vietnam, a subject — indeed, a passion — to which he devoted the last half of his life. Fly Away Home was designed to be, in his words, “a television War and Peace about Vietnam” that he alone would write to the tune of twenty-two hours broadcast over the course of a single year. As early as 1962, he had addressed the difficulties of returning Vietnam veterans in a Route 66 episode, also called “Fly Away Home,” with Glenn Corbett. Silliphant stressed that his series would be not just about one battle, but an overview. Unlike The Deer Hunter, which he didn’t like because it used Koreans as Vietnamese, or Apocalypse Now, which he liked even though they used Filipinos as Vietnamese, Fly Away Home would hire real Vietnamese performers, including Tiana, who would play the surgeon daughter of a Saigon politician. It would go, he promised, “from the Tet offensive in 1968 until the fall of Saigon in 1975 when the last of the invaders butted out. ABC let us make the two-hour pilot, [257] but whatever flicker of courage had caused the network to authorize me to develop such a bold and daring show suddenly was extinguished. I suspect that New York [ABC’s headquarters) shot it down. The sales people probably said to the West Coast, ‘You fucking idiots, what are you guys doing? What corporation is going to sponsor this thing?’
    “I can’t even begin to tell you what a crushing blow it was to have this mini-series aborted in the way it was. It sent me into weeks of destructive behavior. I went public. I announced — imagine, I, a lone writer without resources or power — that never again would I work for ABC until certain executives were fired. And I named them. Well, three years later I was back at ABC. All the guilty had been expunged; vengeance would have been sweet had their dismissals come as a result of my pissing in the wind. But, no, simple attrition did them in. They’re gone — and I’m still producing — so possibly there and there only can one isolate the triumph, meaningless as it may be. But the bitter bottom line is that what might have been a major contribution to the American psyche — airing the issues of the U.S. involvement in Indochina — never came to being.
    “I think the thing that haunted me the most was the fact that, for once in all my years of writing, I had actually written the last line of dialogue for a script which would have run 1,320 pages and covered a period of seven tumultuous years cross-cut between Vietnam and the States — and never got to use it. The line was to be spoken by the news cameraman, the part played by Bruce Boxleitner, as, remaining behind after the Americans abandoned Saigon, he is photographing the first NVA tank breaking through the fence at the Presidential Palace. He looks at the faces of South Vietnamese — faces without expression — a series of cameos which tell you nothing — and everything. And he says, more to himself than to anybody, ‘Won’t anybody say we’re sorry?’
    “Over and out. I never got to use the line. And to this moment nobody — no American I have ever heard, certainly nobody in either our government or in our military hierarchy — has ever spoken those absolving words: ‘WE’RE SORRY!’”
    Networks were not Silliphant’s only bête noir. On occasion, a star could assume the position, as a big one did on Over the Top. “As warming as was my experience with Clint Eastwood,” Silliphant said, “my experience with Sylvester Stallone represents everything I detest about Hollywood. Stallone has one talent: that is to have soaked up all the bullshit which has accumulated in La La Land over the years, coated it with an ersatz patina of culture and love of fine art, and created from his boot-straps a genuine, authentic Monster.”
    Over the Top (1987) is about a divorced trucker who wins his estranged