ince the World Series begins this week, a column that begins with a baseball-related anecdote is ... well, timely. Besides, sci-fi television and America's pastime both involve pitching. ...
Earl Weaver was the legendary manager of the Baltimore Orioles during their glory years of the 1970s and 1980s, when the team won four American League pennants and one World Series over the feared Big Red Machine—the Cincinnati Reds.
(I have a tenuous family connection to Weaver: In the early 1950s, when Weaver was a catcher with the minor-league Houston Buffaloes, one of his teammates was a young pitcher from Iowa named Florian "Lefty" Cassutt—my dad.)
Weaver never had a particularly distinguished career as a player—as far as I know, he never reached the major leagues—but this didn't prevent him from becoming a successful manager at the age of 26. He went on to formulate his own theories about how to win ball games, most of them boiling down to an emphasis on three elements: "Pitching, defense and three-run home runs."
Decisions on pitching brought Weaver into constant conflict with several of his players, including Hall of Fame hurler Jim Palmer. (Have I mentioned that Weaver was notoriously cantankerous? He still holds the baseball record for being ejected from games.)
After one public disagreement over Palmer's selection of curve balls and sliders during a game, Palmer announced, "The only thing Earl Weaver knows about big-league pitching is that he couldn't hit it."
Which is how I feel about the whole business of timing.
All I know is, I don't have it.
Struggling to surf the
zeitgeist
In television terms, timing is the product of a complicated equation combining the right concept and the right network, the right cast and timeslot.
Then there's the whole magical business of the zeitgeist—that moment when the viewing public is ready to embrace an idea.
Gene Roddenberry had great timing—he pitched Star Trek when network television executives, no doubt impressed by the early Vostok and Mercury manned space flights, had not only heard of flight into space, but were willing to consider the idea that it might be worth a television series. The fact that CBS was considering a sci-fi adventure called Lost in Space no doubt added to their sense of, er, embracing the zeitgeist. (It was good timing, not to mention smart, to follow the era of the network television western, too, with a sci-fi concept that could be pitched as "Wagon Train to the stars.")
Chris Carter had great timing—X-Files caught the wave of paranormal paranoia swirling under the U.S. in the late 1990s, and even helped fuel it. (Note to self: Do another column called "Blowback.")
Joss Whedon had it with Buffy. Audiences who had grown up on serious dark fantasy movies—and thousands of hours of teen dramas—were ready for a smart, self-referential take on the subject.
I started obsessing—again—about the lack of timing in my career when I went to see Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow. For those of you who've missed it, it's a big-budget retro science-fiction film with the visual look and feel of a comic book or pulp magazine cover of the 1940s, with story and dialogue to match.
Six years ago I traipsed up and down the Wilshire corridor in the company of a marvelous feature film director, who should probably remain nameless here, pitching a television anthology series of retro sci-fi. That is, we would take classic stories like Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon or Jack Williamson's ... With Folded Hands, both of them published in the 1940s, and film them as faithfully as we could.
For Man Who Sold, this meant treating history as if there had never been an Apollo program—or a Cold War, for that matter. But it would also have allowed us to portray Heinlein's fascinating and detailed alternate future, in which "road cities" stretched across the country and "antipodal rockets" carried passengers and cargo to colonies in Antarctica. For Folded Hands, it meant showing a world of robots without personal computers and the Internet.
The look would have been that wonderful pulp-deco style, though we had hoped to use a faster pace and snappier dialogue.
From the baffling responses we received, you'd have thought we were proposing to film the life of Jesus Christ in Latin and Aramaic. (I know, I know, but how far do you think The Passion of the Christ would have gotten as a pitch from someone less famous than Mel Gibson?)
Sci-fi trends
can be Eerie
Even earlier I was involved with two series that should have gone on to longer life. One was Max Headroom, the wonderful cyberpunk concept from the minds of George Stone, Annabel Jankel, Rocky Morton and Steve Roberts. Had Max aired on the early Fox network, or cable, rather than ABC opposite the juggernaut Dallas, it would have run for several years. Instead, its baffling style and vision (by the standards of the late 1980s) turned off viewers whose idea of sci-fi was bordered by Star Trek reruns, V and the first Battlestar Galactica.
The other, Eerie, Indiana, created by Karl Schaefer and Jose Rivera, was a wonderfully engaging series about a boy who moves, with his family, from New Jersey to the "center of weirdness." It had a terrific cast, and was just killed by scheduling. NBC put it on Sunday night opposite 60 Minutes, following a lame comedy series that lasted a handful of episodes. Eerie was rerun on The Disney Channel, and I have a vague memory that a new version was made by other parties.
But it was more bad timing.
I like to think I'm philosophical about this. After all, I've had my successes. And I can tell myself that most of my bad timing is simply spotting a trend or concept before other people.
Which is, I guess, what a sci-fi writer is supposed to do.
In best Field of Dreams fashion, I remember having many games of catch with my father, in which he would demonstrate his ability to throw not only fast and slow curve balls, but knucklers that often bounced off my forehead.
It taught me one very valuable lesson. I not only couldn't hit minor league pitching—I could barely catch it.
Michael Cassutt's newest novel, Tango Midnight, will be published in paperback by Tor in January. His most recent television credits include The Dead Zone (USA Network) and Odyssey 5 (Showtime). His most recent home run was in Little League.
