George RR Martin – The TV Years

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Small Screen, Big Ideas

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We all know George RR Martin the novelist. But do you know about George RR Martin the television screenwriter? Steve O’Brien examines his small screen history…

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Two years ago George RR Martin was named by Time magazine as one of their "2011 Time 100", an elite list of the "most influential people in the world". That’s an easy accolade to be awarded when your books are instant bestsellers and the TV show you helped create is one that’s as lauded as it is lovebombed. But back in the mid-1980s, George RR Martin, then in his late 30s, couldn’t get arrested. In 1983, his fourth book, The Armageddon Rag, flopped big-time, "essentially,” he said later, “it destroyed my career as a novelist.”

Reluctantly, Martin was out of the novel game, and so an offer to take up residency on CBS-birthed revamp of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone was a godsend to the young(ish) fantasy writer. Martin joined the series first as a staff writer, later graduating to Executive Story Consultant.

This second coming of The Twilight Zone lasted just three seasons (with Martin only working on the first two), and struggled with lowly ratings throughout its short TV life. Though the smudgy edited-on-video production process makes the series hard to watch with 2013 eyes, it’s considerably better than its tatty reputation suggests. Writers such as Harlan Ellison Greg Bear, Robert McCammon and Twilight Zone veteran Richard Matheson all penned episodes, and the series boasted adaptations of stories by Arthur C Clarke and Stephen King and directors such as Wes Craven and William Friedkin.

Martin would end up penning five episodes for the newly polished Twilight Zone - The Last Defender of Camelot, The Once And Future King, Lost & Found, The Toys of Caliban and The Road Less Travelled.

“The Twilight Zone was always a nightmare for them because it was an anthology,” Martin told Time magazine recently. “We did serious dramatic shows, we did science fiction, we did fantasy, we did the psychological stories, we did comedies. What the network had decided what the Twilight Zone was about was, an ordinary person who blunders into extraordinary circumstances. You know, entering the twilight zone. Ordinary Joe comes up and encounters something weird; now, he’s in the twilight zone. And he has to deal with Martians or whatever it is.”

Martin’s first show, The Last Defender of Camelot, was based on a short story by an old mate of his, Roger Zelazny. Initially intent on doing a totally faithful adaptation, he soon realised the compromises that would later become a regular part of the job. He was told his script - which included Stonehenge and a budget-stretching gang of horses - that he could have one or the other. Stonehenge could be made out of papier mache in the studio, but if they had horses as well, the papier mache would probably not survive, insisted the show’s line producer.

“We were about to go into production and suddenly a network executive says, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute. There’s no ordinary person in this.’ The characters are Merlin, Morgan LeFay and Lancelot. This isn’t The Twilight Zone, you can’t do this! So they forced us to add an ordinary person. I had to add a character named Tom, who Lancelot picks up and sort of carries along, who fulfills no particular function than being in the story. But he’s just there. Explaining that to Roger was the worst part.

“Nonetheless, when they started building Stonehenge on the soundstage behind my office, it was an incredible rush. So right from that first episode, I got both sides of what it’s like to work at television. And suddenly I realised that when that episode aired, more people had just seen my work than had ever read all the books I had ever written up to that point in my life and the stories combined.”

Martin exited the show after its second season with a bunch of skilfully adapted stories and one Martin original (the Serling-like The Road Less Travelled, about a draft-dodging teacher who meets up with the man he could have been if he’d have enlisted to Vietnam) under his belt. He had been offered a tantalising offer from CBS to join a new fantasy series titled Beauty and the Beast.

Martin spent three years on the show, first as producer, then as co-supervising producer. The series had been created by Ron Koslow, and was partly inspired by Jean Cocteau's 1945 film version of the age-old fairy tale. Linda Hamilton was “Beauty”, or Catherine Chandler, a chic New York DA attacked and left for dead one night in Central Park, until she’s saved by “Beast”, or Vincent to his family (Ron Perlman), who carries her to his home in the hidden tunnels beneath the city, and nurses her back to health. They fall in love, but neither can live in the others’ world.

Despite the prosthetics and lion hair, Vincent became an unlikely heart throb to a gaggle of swooning women in the 1980s, seduced as they were the series’ epically romantic tone and strong female-fuelled plots.

“I looked at the pilot, and it was a quality series,” Martin said later. “If you work in television, you want to work for Hill Street Blues, not Three's Company. And you want to be associated with the highest quality of material, and I could tell looking at this that it looked beautiful, it was well directed, it was well written, the actors were superb, and I said this is the kind of show I want to do. And there was the fantasy element, of course. Koslow was also very generous. He had had the initial vision, but there was still a lot of room to create; for the other writers to add things to that vision, and not not just be executing his vision but to make their own contribution. And I appreciated that.”

The show pressed a lot of the same buttons that Stephenie Meyer would master two decades later with the Twilight series, and there’s definitely a sliver of Buffy, Angel and Charmed in the mix. It showed early on how sympathetic Martin was writing for female characters and his skill at creating complex fantasy worlds. He wrote 13 episodes of the series, beginning with the second, Terrible Savior and was essentially the series’ showrunner, penning some of the show’s tentpole episodes. It was he who made the decision to kill off Catherine, when Linda Hamilton quit the show in the third season. The ramifications of Hamilton’s leaving would kickstart an arc that would run throughout the show’s final series. Ambitious in a time when networks - even more than now - preferred self-contained stories. 

“Certainly all of us on the show knew that Catherine's death would be hard for many people to accept,” Martin said later. “Catherine may have been dead, but her memory and her presence *drenched* the third season, impacting on every character, shaping their dialogue, their actions, their very look on life. Never in the entire history of television has a dead character been mourned so long and so grievously by so many. But in doing the ‘right thing’, we may have killed the show we all loved. Viewers come to television to be entertained... perhaps they were simply not ready to accept the levels of rage and pain and despair and grief that we served them up that year. We served them up because we felt it was true, that this was what *would* happen to Vincent and his world if Catherine died... but that did not make it any more fun to watch.”

Beauty and the Beast eventually fizzled to an end, and George RR Martin went back to the novelists bench, readying the world for the first instalment of A Song of Fire & Ice in 1991. “I felt like doing something big,” he said. “I'd been working in TV for ten years. Television movies are very restrictive; for a one hour show, you only have 46 minutes. You are always cutting, cutting, cutting. I wanted to do something more expansive, something epic without having to worry about how big it was going to be. Where I could have characters without economising on plot and where I could have a cast of thousands. I wouldn't have to worry about the budget. A Song of Fire And Ice was almost a reaction to my ten years in TV!”

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Doorways 100 words

In 1991, at the same time as A Game of Thrones was being released, Martin was hard at work prepping his first self-created SF series. Titled Doorways, it focused on Dr Thomas Mason and a mysterious woman named Cat who are being chased in and out of different parallel worlds by Cat’s enemies. A pilot was made, and six episodes ordered by ABC, but six months later the plug was pulled, much to Martin’s disappointment. Doorways finally saw the light of day in 2010 when a four-part comic adaptation by published by IDW. It was, in Martin’s words, “much cooler than the television show could ever have been."

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George RR Martin’s unproduced screenplays

Wild Cards

Ward Cards is an superhero anthology series curated by Martin and former Star Trek: The Next Generation writer Melinda Snodgrass. The shared universe books have been released periodically since 1987 and continue to this day. Two years ago, a feature film version was announced, for which Martin and Snodgrass have written a script. “One of the things we have going is the sense of history,” Martin said at the time. “The comics in the mainstream are doing retcons [retroactive continuity] all the time. Heroes get married, then one day, the publisher changes his mind, and then they’re no longer married. To my mind, it’s very frustrating. Our stories are in real time. It’s a world that is changing in parallel to our own.”

A Princess of Mars

In 1991, Martin and his Wild Cards cohort Melinda Snodgrass were commissioned by Disney to adapt Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first John Carter novel, A Princess of Mars, despite Martin telling the studio he had little interest in the series. Probably much to Disney’s and indeed Martin’s relief, their script has never surfaced publicly. “Film I have come to hate,” he said recently. “The writer is king in TV; in film, the writer is shit. I spent three or four years of my life doing screenplays, and don't have a foot of film to show for it. In fact, no one ever *saw* the screenplays except a few development execs. I love going to movies, but if I am lucky I will never have to develop one again.”

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The Outer Limits - The Sandkings

In 1995, The Twilight Zone’s 1960s rival The Outer Limits was exhumed for what would turn out to be a successful (well, way more than the Twilight Zone’s revival) seven-season run. Less whimsical and more monster-focused than it’s Rod Serling-birthed opposite number, the new series premiered with a 90-minute episode based on Martin’s 1979 novella Sandkings.

Beau Bridges stars as Dr Simon Kress, a scientist who, when his research on Martian soil is stopped, continues his work in his home, pilfering some sand containing alien eggs from his former laboratory. When the eggs hatch and begin to evolve they begin to exhibit not only sentience but intelligence, Kress begins to develop signs of madness and delusions of godhood.

Adapted by Martin’s regular collaborator Melinda Snodgrass, the TV episode is significantly different to its literary counterpart. In the novella, Bridges’ character is a wealthy playboy from a planet colonised by humans who is given the sandking creatures to keep as pets. Snodgrass’s reinvention of the story keeps the budget to manageable levels and makes it a much more relatable story, but loses much of Martin’s rich imagination in the process. The episode is notable though for giving three generations of the Bridges family screentime together. Lloyd Bridges is Kress’s militaristic father and 11-year-old Dylan is Kress’ son Josh. Just beware Beau’s thunderously misjudged ponytail.