ALL SCI-FI

[Bud Brewster]

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All Sci-Fi member Pow is the author of the fine post below, which I copied from the five-page thread for The Outer Limits and pasted below to start a new thread for this one.
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I found this interesting chapter in The Outer Limits: The Official Companion book.

Joseph Stefano: "We initially sought out science fiction writers, and they were the worst! They didn't seem to have any concept of what film writing was about."

Among the earliest visitors to the Villa di Stefano bungalow were Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and The Twilight Zone's own Charles Beaumont. "I told Lou Morheim (story editor) that we'd better forget these guys. We did pay for some scripts we didn't shoot, and we got other scripts from well-known writers that were just unproduceable."

Sidebar: I recall reading somewhere that fine science fiction writers do not always make for fine scriptwriters for a SF television series. Being a talented novelist does not always translate into being able to adapt those skills to producing scripts for a SF TV show.

They are two different skill sets that few can transition between. One issue is that many SF writers don't comprehend the limited budgets of a television production company. These writers continue to write with their imaginations at full power and without any limitations. They create scripts that would require a multi-million dollar feature film budget and a three-month shooting schedule.

Noted author Harlan Ellison was one of the few writers who was able to tackle TV. Ellison admitted that some excellent SF authors he knew and were friends of his did not possess the abilities to be screenwriters and it took a different set of "muscles" to be able to successfully write for film and TV as opposed to literature.

Now we know why SF TV shows did not always manage to hire well known SF authors for their series. It wasn't a reluctance on the part of a SF production staff because "they knew better" than a seasoned SF author. It was often due to the authors not comprehending the complexities of TV production.
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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)