My First Break

by Malcolm MacRury

Quote the Cyclops: “I can’t believe my eye”

It’s the Summer of 86. The fabled Summer of Love in swinging, anything-goes, uber-leather-panted Yorkville. (Note to Editor: Please fact check this section.)

Happy? Well I should say! I’m here above the wine bar on my very first gig writing for the small screen and seated all around me are some of the legendary talents of SCTV, my very favorite television show.

Why just across the IKEA table there’s that actor who played a waiter serving Johnny LaRue a highball in the Kit Kat Klub. And to my side there’s a real live Flaherty. Not Count Floyd. Not his brother. But definitely a relation.

Odd how none of my new writing colleagues will make eye contact with me? –Focus on the job. –But why can’t they hear me when I speak? – Focus on the job.– Why do they have muffins? –Focus. –I am invisible. I am a lowly rotten worm. –You’re being paid good money here today above the wine bar. Focus on the job.

The Job. The producer’s secured the rights to a Japanese-language TV series called Dynaman. It stars brightly garbed young people who race about in flying machines that can transform into a huge Samurai Robot through what appears to be the power of vegetables.

Our task in this writers’ room is to transform Dynaman into something like Woody Allen’s What’s Up Tiger Lilly? To stuff the Japanese actors’ mouths with non-sequiturs, knock-knock gags, and loopy shopping tips. To make the wave of the future, or what our producer calls–“Absolutely mindless TV.”

The video starts to play in Japanese. As I watch it I wander… For this I spent four years at the Institute for Christian Studies/Free University of Amsterdam earning a Masters of Philosophy? For this I lived in a co-op cell writing a three-hundred-page thesis on the keys of a rented typewriter lacking the letter “y”? Apparently so. (Mimeographed copies of “Debating the Past and Future: Conflicting Views of Historie in The MacKenzie Vallie Pipeline Inquirie, 1972 - 1974” are still available from the Author at the WGC–discounted price of $5 American. Please enclose your Fed Ex account number to ensure a prompt and safe delivery.)

Yet there’s no time to reflect on the wonderfully strange places that a questioning of faith can take you. For the room fills with cigarette smoke as we few writers watch the Tokyo teens battle with monstrous ghouls and shout out alternate lines that will make the show’s new audience howl – “Guigi Guigi good!” “Le’go my Lego!”–

The comedy vets see through me. Eyes slyly roll when the fumbling virgin tries to joke and jolly them along. Their muffins are bit. I am indeed a lowly rotten worm. Until–until a huge Cyclops appears on the television screen and is stabbed in his lone eye by the masked teens’ Samurai Robot.

“I can’t believe my eye,” says I. Silence. Nothing is said either in praise or damnation. But the D-Boy writes the line down with his B-grade pencil.

I’m paid one hundred dollars. Canadian. It was supposed to be two hundred, but as the producer explains, it was only the one line.

Nevertheless, I am a professional screenwriter. I spend happy weeks dreaming up surreal plots for subsequent episodes; confident that Dynaman is a goer, sure that Dynaman is the future’s wave.

The pilot tanks. The rights are dropped. A Hong Kong company picks them up and makes The Mighty Morphine Power Rangers and makes themselves a gazillion dollars of which I have not one or a hundred.

Quote the Cyclops: “I can’t believe my eye.”

But it was fun. More fun than writing a lonely dissertation on a sad-sack machine. More fun than telling lies to yourself alone in your room–as a much-wiser writer will much-later tell me while lying on the floor of the deceased Bing Crosby’s room.

Besides, I have a start. All a writer needs or wants. (Note to Editor: Please fact check this claim.)

For in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king –which is what my lovely Cyclops really told me.